Nightmares

1.     On both sides of sleep there are dreams I cannot remember.  What if the images shattered and became confused with one another?

2.    I could not stand it if another friendship were lost through politics.  Yet it is not politics as ideology or epistemology that causes these breaches.  It is the fact that we no longer see the same realities.  Not that we respond to events in different ways with different interpretations; it is that our worlds are composed of different facts.  It would be as though a mirror no longer reflected my time and place, and in a rage the person on the other side shattered the glass, yet kept on talking and laughing.

3.    Consider these possibilities: (a) the people you most want to communicate with no longer answer your letters but nevertheless talk about their contents to each other; (b) someone on the other side of the world you have not thought about for many years writes to you and on the day you receive their message and the memories begin to stir in your heart, you learn that they have died; (c) suddenly you remember a promise made years before that caused a friend great pain when you neglected to keep it, and now your letters come back in which you apologize and offer to make amends, marked addressee unknown.

4.    Whole generations have been born and come to maturity and I have never seen or heard of them.  If anyone should knock on my door and introduce himself, what could I possible say?  And if I were not at home, would they ever return?

5.    I used to walk down the tree-lined streets of this city where I have lived nearly fifty years and would in my mind describe the people and buildings to someone who lived long before I was born.  That person, however, was always myself as I imagined myself to be in another era.  What I really wanted was for him to tell me what the world was like before I appeared.  All he could do, it seems, was to remind me that I was a stranger and did not belong in this place.

6.    Movies from the 1920s and 1930s intrigue me because, though I was not yet born, they seem more real than anything I have experienced in life.  Movies of the 1940s are frightening because, though I was then alive and conscious, yet I know they are stylized and unreal.  Still, what I fear most of all, is that I will see myself standing in the crowd staring into the camera.