cross off and move on

Adela, Bernice, and Charna, the youngest—all gone for a long time now, blurred into a flock sailing through memory, their long, thin legs streaming out beneath the fluffy domes of their mangy fur coats, their great beaky noses pointing the way. From "Cross Off and Move On" by Deborah Eisenberg, full story on NYRB

Painting: Confrontation 1 (1988) by Gerhard Richter, via Tate

twilight of the superheroes

"It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise." Deborah Eisenberg

Photo: Stil in Berlin

inexhaustible engagement

She seemed to be at least twice as alive as most of us—to know everything, to do everything, to be inexhaustibly engaged. Her arresting appearance was familiar even to many nonreaders from the photographs that recorded it over several decades and registered the glamour and magnetism—the sheer size—of her personality, and her celebrity was all the more potent and irreversible because the place she occupied was so far outside the usual radius of the spotlight.

Deborah Eisenberg on Susan Sontag, NYRB
Photo of Susan Sontag and son David Rieff by Diane Arbus
via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger

no idea

"I don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever." Deborah Eisenberg. Art by Irana Douer.

twilight of the superheroes

Looking at a painting takes a certain composure, a certain resolve, but when you really do look at one it can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It's as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history—a sensation, really, that's a lot like hope. From "The Flaw in the Design," by Deborah Eisenberg.

Painting: Seascape (Contrejour), 1969 by Gerhard Richter.

that gummy jungle (friendship)

...time is as adhesive as love, and the more time you spend with someone the greater likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as "friendship," as if that were the end of the matter, when the truth is that even if "your friend" does something annoying, or if you and "your friend" decide that you hate each other, or if "your friend" moves away and you lose each other's address, you still have a friendship, and although it can change shape, look different in different lights, become an embarrassment, or an encumbrance or a sorrow, it can't simply cease to have existed, no matter how far into the past it sinks, so attempts to disavow or destroy it will not merely constitute betrayals of friendship but, more practically, are bound to be fruitless, causing damage only to the humans involved rather than to that gummy jungle (friendship) in which those humans have entrapped themselves, so if sometime in the future you're not going to want to have been a particular person's friend, or if you're not going to want to have had the particular friendship you and that person can make with one another, don't talk to that person, don't go anywhere near that person, because as soon as you start to see something from that person's point of view (which, inevitably will be as soon as you stand next to that person) common ground is sure to slide under your feet.

From "A Cautionary Tale" by Deborah Eisenberg