Edmund White

Sometimes, as I learned, a friend is no more than someone to kill time with, a voice chattering into the receiver a litany of questions, all those lumpy sandbags—individually light but cumulatively heavy—that hang from the girdle around the balloon's suspended car to slow its ascent into cold, unbreathable solitude.

Being popular was equivalent to becoming a character, perhaps even a person, since if to be is to be perceived, then to be perceived by many eyes and with envy, interest, respect or affection is to exist more densely, more articulately, every last detail minutely observed and thereby richly rendered.

All my life I've made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely, too.

I felt the need to free myself of desire. I must not want anything. I must feel no attachments. Above all, no attractions. I must give up all hope, plans, glad anticipations. I must study oblivion. I must give room and board to silence and pay tuition to the void. Even the slightest flicker of longing must be stilled. Every wire must be pulled until the console goes dead and all dials point to zero.

All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, un-molded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher's lard.