It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.

I took a little celebrational nap.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.