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We’ve gone many months, and once nearly a decade, in the dark, not knowing whether we’ll speak again. I’m furious at her now, but writing this as a valentine, I’d like to think: Come back, crazy friend. I’m big enough for you still. I’ve got what it costs to know you, and though I may seem reluctant to spend it all in one place, I’d hate to die with it in my pocket.

- from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence

The whole setup to that passage is also great. Here’s part of it:

I’m still looking for the crazy wherever I can find it. It’s hard enough to kick against the plastic Victorianisms of our culture, the social sarcophagus of daily life. Even attempting it can make you crazy, let alone succeeding as well as (Philip K.) Dick did. I like helpless braggarts, obsessive fools, angry people. My ears prick up at the word “pretentious”—that’s usually the movie I want to see, the book I want to read, the scene I want to make. Nearly anyone I’ve found worth knowing was difficult enough, vivid enough, to qualify at some point as my crazy friend.

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UPDATE (a few minutes later)

A couple more things:

* Thanks to Austin Kleon. His 1/27 post is the reason I’m reading Lethem’s book. Just the picture, really. All that highlighting. I was intrigued and needed to read it myself. Please consider pre-ordering Austin’s forthcoming book, Steal Like An Artist. 

* Narcissism prevents me from thinking of Lethem without also thinking of this old post of mine, documenting Lethem’s uncommonly memorable 2009 appearance here in my neighborhood. Since I already used the word “narcissism” in the previous sentence, I don’t need to be coy about linking to Macy Halford’s newyorker.com post about my post. Part of me still can’t quite believe that happened. I will continue to link to it until it feels real. Daily, perhaps.

I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start. Here, have a passage: As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start.

Here, have a passage:

As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

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I recall talking at a party to a USIS man who spoke in a low mellifluous voice of fevers he had known, fevers in Sierra Leone, fevers in Monrovia, fevers on the Colombian coast. Our host interrupted this litany, demanded to know why the ambassador had not come to the party. “Little situation in Cali,” the USIS man said, and smiled professionally. He seemed very concerned that no breach of American manners be inferred, and so, absurdly, did I. We had nothing in common except the eagles on our passports, but those eagles made us, in some way I did not entirely understand, co-conspirators, two strangers heavy with responsibility for seeing that the eagle should not offend. We would prefer the sweet local Roman-Cola to the Coca-Cola the Colombians liked. We would think of Standard Oil as Esso Colombiano. We would not speak of fever except to one another.

- Joan Didion from the 1974 essay “In Bogotá”

I’ve taken to holding a pencil while I read The White Album. The passage above is the latest of so many that I’ve marked to find again and re-read later and maybe even type out just for the pleasure of sending the words through my own fingers, which seems to be what I’ve done here.

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To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.

- Joan Didion in 1961, spelunking terrain that may or may not remind us exactly of the way we function online and cope with the bizarreness of being followed, unfollowed, blogged, reblogged, retweeted, flamed, liked.

The passage comes from Didion’s essay called “On Self-Respect.” It’s in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a book I owned, partly read, purged, and now have out of the library.

I’ve typed out some other passages, meaning to add them to this post. One includes a Gatsby reference. Since a Gatsby reference has become one of the cheapest, best ways to appeal to me, I don’t trust my love of the passage. I will cheat by keeping this relatively short and posting the other quotes elsewhere. Here, specifically.