Status Updates From The White Album: Essays

“I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife…the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me.”

P. 211 of WTOSIOTL

“I was asked this question by the manager, who was a Mormon: if you can’t believe you’re going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what’s the point of dying?
At that time I believed that my basic affective controls were no longer intact, but now I present this to you as a more cogent question than it might first appear, a kind of koan of the period.