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All I could think of at that time was how to get away from Griswold. I didn't want to be trapped, like my mother. Although I admired her—everyone was always telling me how admirable she was, she was practically a saint—I didn't want to be like her in any way. I didn't want to have a family or be anyone's mother, ever; I had none of those ambitions. I didn't want to own any objects or inherit any. I didn't want to cope. I didn't want to deteriorate. I used to pray that I wouldn't live long enough to get like my grandmother, and now I guess I won't.
When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
Understanding came after the fact. That was how life worked: I'm being hit by a car, I'm having a heart attack, that purple-gray thing emerging from between my legs is the head of our child. Epiphanies. They were the end of a chain of events invisible until that epiphany had been reached. You had to walk backward and try to make sense. That's what people did, that's how people learned. Yes. So. The thing was a noise.
It's funny, after all these years I'm still fascinated by how people hurt each other, why it happens, and by what makes people need to be cruel. But I'm afraid my interest nowadays has become practical. When I was a child, I was curious about the mechanics of pain. Now I want to understand for reasons of security. "Watch yourself"—it's still the best advice anyone ever gave me. Pain is always about to happen somewhere to someone I know and at times it seems that the best I can hope for is not to be the cause of it. In this way I guess I am a product of my generation, most of us anxious pragmatists and skeptics, who are less interested in the mysteries of human pain and cruelty than in how to avoid them.
