"Like most people I'm a pessimist by experience but an optimist by nature. I shall go on being true to my nature. It is often a mistake to learn from experience."
“Kötü bir anıyı unutmanın en iyi yolu güzel bir tanesiyle değişmektir.”
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served only to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us. Any answer he gave could exist only in my imagination, my edit. For me to imagine what he could say only in my edit would seem obscene, a violation.
I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.
There were days when I relied on W. H. Auden, the “Funeral Blues” lines from The Ascent of F6:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
The poems and the dances of the shades seemed the most exact to me.