Archives for March 30, 2021

From 2018:

Once you turn fifty, you start the downhill run: your life is half over at best, and you pick up more and more speed as you go. Small wonder, then, that everything that’s happened to me since 2001 seems to have happened both recently and simultaneously, whereas all previous events—my father’s death, for instance—are equally distant, walled off in my memory by 9/11, the Great Divide that cleaved in twain the lives of my generation, just as the Kennedy assassination and Pearl Harbor did to those Americans who preceded us….

Read the whole thing here.

“Human memory is astonishingly short and if you want my professional opinion I don’t mind telling you that I don’t believe remorse for a crime ever sits very heavily on a man when he’s absolutely sure he’ll never be found out.”

Somerset Maugham, “Footprints in the Jungle”