Renouncements

Here are a few things I’ll probably never do:

Read Lolita, despite the fact that “you can always count on a murderer [and pedophile] for a fancy prose style.”

See Django or any less “artistic” glorification of violence (such as, say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) even when the violence may be, from most perspectives, even my own, justifiable.

Kazantzakis's epitaph: I hope for
 nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.

Go back to Bread Loaf or the Vermont Studio Center or Italy or London--or see Moscow or Vienna or Yeats’s grave for the first time. If I haven’t seen it so far (as, for instance, I have seen Kazantzakis’s grave in Heraklion), my conscience, slippery and self-serving as it is, will not look kindly on this personal use of jet fuel.

Encourage my children to have children, although I am longing for babies (and my own reproductive system is, of course, defunct). If babies do arrive I will be crazy with happiness and cherish them above all human beings except my husband and their parents--okay, maybe more, at least for a while. This is not a subject on which most people are sane. I am no exception.

Keep indulging my once-a-month craving for red meat. It’s starting to make me sick.

Likewise, red wine. It’s already making me sick. This has been and will continue to be a struggle.

Go back to therapy. I’ve had some fruitful experiences, but therapy is about adjusting to the world as we find it, and if we continue to do that . . . things are way past serious, folks.

Go back to church. Even the most inclusive cannot help theorizing about what separates good people from bad.

Keep getting my hair colored—if you know me you will realize how big a renouncement this is.