The Willingness To Accept Responsibility For One's

The Freeway Experience ... Is The Only Secular Communion Los Angeles Has. Mere Driving On The Freeway Is In No Way The Same As Participating In It. Anyone Can "drive" On The Freeway, And Many People With No Vocation For It Do, Hesitating Here And Resisting There, Losing The Rhythm Of The Lane Change, Thinking About Where They Came From And Where They Are Going. Actual Participation Requires Total Surrender, A Concentration So Intense As To Seem A Kind Of Narcosis, A Rapture-of-the-freeway. The Mind Goes Clean. The Rhythm Takes Over.

You Have Your Wonderful Memories," People Said Later, As If Memories Were Solace. Memories Are Not. Memories Are By Definition Of Times Past, Things Gone. Memories Are The Westlake Uniforms In The Closet, The Faded And Cracked Photographs, The Invitations To The Weddings Of The People Who Are No Longer Married, The Mass Cards From The Funerals Of The People Whose Faces You No Longer Remember. Memories Are What You No Longer Want To Remember.

Outside, A Ceiling Of Pearly Gray Clouds Coalesced Over Manhattan, And The Apartment Had Grown Dark. It Just Keeps Dripping. It's Been Like This All Week, .. Rain Would Be A Relief.

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… We Play Roles Doomed To Failure Before They Are Begun, Each Defeat Generating Fresh Despair At The Urgency Of Divining And Meeting The Next Demand Made Upon Us.