I will be on the road, or more properly, in the mountains, for another two weeks, but pulled this Friday collection of notes and quotes together before leaving. Thanks for reading.

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Freud wrote that anatomy is destiny.

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“Memory, unaided by even a photograph, lays a claim on us that is so much more exacting for being so perishable.” From the New York Times Book Review (10.6.2003)

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Nathanael West, writing on Americans, from The Day of the Locust (1939):

They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment. All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theres…. Where else would they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?… They get tired of oranges…. They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all…. [Newspapers and movies] fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars…. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates…. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved of nothing.

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Life is the opportunity for art. Be a master wherever you are. Expose the truth wherever you go.