outimacy

from sidewalks by valeria luiselli

"the nostalgia isn't always a nostalgia for a past. there are things that produce nostalgia in advance -- spaces that we know to be lost as soon as we find them -- places in which we know ourselves to be happier than we will ever be afterwards. in such situations, the soul twists itself around, as if in a voluntary simulacrum of seeing its present in retrospect. like an eye watching itself look from the perspective of a later time, it sees that remote present and yearns for it."

"cities, like our bodies, like language, are destruction under construction."

"we live in a world in which there has been a complete inversion of the status of the street as the public space and the house as the ultimate private space. in this redistribution of the private-public categories it's difficult to know when we're really inside and when out. i say this without the least hint of nostalgia. in the street we can no longer commune with solitude, and even in our own homes, we can't be with ourselves without the windows of computers claiming our already deficient attention or the neighbors installing themselves in the backyard of our brains"

"conversely, intelligent people who grow up thinking one thing and, on reaching a certain age, realize that everything they believed is open to doubt -- stark, brutal doubt -- can truly enjoy a profound crisis that, in the worst cases, leads them to know themselves a little better. as t.s. eliot contends, the spirit of belief is impossible to separate from the demon of doubt."