“We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must havethe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthlessfurnace of this world. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

“We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”

“We exist with a wind whispering inside and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones.”

“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”

“Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story.”

“The Forgotten Dialect of the HeartHow astonishing it is that language can almost mean,and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the wordsget it all wrong. We say bread and it means accordingto which nation. French has no word for home,and we have no word for strict pleasure. A peoplein northern India is dying out because their ancienttongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lostvocabularies that might express some of whatwe no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts wouldfinally explain why the couples on their tombsare smiling. And maybe not. When the thousandsof mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,they seemed to be business records. But what if theyare poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelveEthiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with boltsof long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundredpitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are whatmy body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are thisdesire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan scriptis not language but a map. What we feel most hasno name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.”

“The water nymphs who came to Poseidonexplained how little they desired to couplewith the gods. Except to find outwhether it was different, whether there wasa fresh world, another dimension in their loins.In the old Pittsburgh, we dreamed of a city where women read Proust in the original French, and wondered whether we would cross overinto a different joy if we paid a call girla thousand dollars for a night. Or an hour. Would it be different in kind or onlytricks and apparatus? I worried that a great love might make everything else an exile. It turned out that being together at twilight in the olive groves of Umbriadid, indeed, measure everything after that.”