Feel Free

Everybody danced. I stood still, oppressed on all sides by dancing, quite sure I was about to go out of my mind.

strange aprons, fashionable at the time, that covered just the front of one’s torso, and only remained decent by means of a few weak-looking strings tied in dainty bows behind

is hard to arrive at generalities in the face of such a small and varied collection of data.

private languages are losing their privacy and becoming known to her.

The advice one finds in ladies’ magazines is usually to be feared, but there is something in that old chestnut: “shared interests.” It does help. I like to hear about the Chinese girl he saw in the hall, carrying
a large medical textbook, so beautiful she looked like an illustration

other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—“other people’s faces.” A red-headed girl, with a marvelous large nose she probably hates, and green eyes and that sun-shy complexion composed more of freckles than skin. Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, combined with a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self.

day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns,

Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in childhood, when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way. I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food. An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around. Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review.

odd kind of purity, like an isolated sample laid out on a Petri dish.

It’s not that you don’t hope to redeem your
parents’ own thwarted ambitions—particularly in the arena of education—you do, but you also understand that if you happen to fail it’s no longer the end of the(ir) world. And, as you motor onwards through your life, whenever you pause to check behind you in the rear-view mirror you see a vista