I was in a fit of extreme and lonely depression. I was living in a pension in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Beccar. I decided to feel sorry for myself in the best way I could. I put on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. My depression plummeted. I put on Astor Piazzolla's Milonga del Angel. It became worse. I discovered that it almost felt good. Since then I periodically have sought melancholy as a sort of perverse pleasure.

These days in July when the phone does not ring I ask my Rosemary this question, “How is tonight different from last night?” She is unable to answer. I somehow feel that whatever usefulness I once had towards my family is now gone. I could very well simply disappear into that oblivion we have given so many names for.

But there is always an escape from that melancholy. To escape it one has to look for it to assert one’s ability to disagree with it.

That moment happened when I read this review of a book that was published in 1979, Black Tickets by Jane Anne Phillips. The very recent review (?) by Dwight Garner in the NY Times.

What caught my eye was this at the end of the review:

In the ways that its young women are caught between worlds, it evokes for me a line from one of Edna O’Brien’s short stories: “I am far from those I am with, and far from those I have left.”