Stay True

Metadata

• Author: Hua Hsu
• Full Title: Stay True
• Category:#books

Highlights

• We stayed up so late, possessed by delirium, that we came up with a theory of everything, only we forgot to write it down. We cycled through legendary infatuations sure to devastate us for the rest of our lives. For a while, you were convinced that you would one day write the saddest story ever. (Location 98)
• There comes a moment for the immigrant’s child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time. (Location 337)
• Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself. (Location 340)
• When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out. We would figure it out together, and we would be different together. I just had to find people to be different with, a critical mass of others to flesh out the possibilities of a collective pronoun. (Location 522)

New highlights added May 25, 2023 at 6:58 AM

• We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won: certainty was boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus. (Location 648)
• we were bored and shared a fondness for ritual; you repeat a gesture enough times until you’re actually friends. (Location 657)
• You repeat the ritual enough and you become actual smokers. Smoking offers a way to build natural breaks into conversation. Lighting a cigarette starts a timer. We had to commence discussion of serious matters, accelerate the chitchat toward its most intimate intensities. Ken always looked very serious whenever he took a drag, eyes downcast, the cigarette hanging from his upper lip, bobbing up and down as he spoke. I loved practicing different ways of holding mine. Wedged between your index and your middle fingers, as if they were chopsticks. Pinched between your thumb and your pointer, as though you were about to squash a bug. Down by the knuckle, between your middle and your ring fingers, so that half your face was covered each time you drew a breath. Nestled in the curl of your forefinger, like a pool cue, so that you could use the lit end to gesture and point. (Location 659)
• The humane thing for Ken to do was to let me keep talking, because I’d eventually run out of straws to grasp at. I appreciated that he was too kind to put me out of my misery and point out my insecurities. Maybe this is what it meant to be known, this feeling of being exposed and transparent. (Location 698)
• Ken knew how to use people—not in an exploitative way, but he understood what key you sang in. He could inspire you to do strange things, and he knew when to defer. Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around. (Location 757)
• Youth is a pursuit of this kind of small immortality. You want to leave something behind. Record a single and put it out in the world, the part of the world that never dies, granted new life in the used bins and secondhand shops. Nestle your zines and manifestos inside newspapers around campus, between the pages of magazines left behind in cafés, your words against theirs. Spray-paint another’s initials in the parking garage. You hurtle toward the future where you might look back upon the intricate secret handshake and laugh at how silly it once was, if you can remember it at all. (Location 772)
• The light felt rich with possibility. You wanted to believe there was no better time or place on earth than this, right now. (Location 790)
• We took pictures of one another, all these random group shots of not-quite-friends. We were now joined by this moment, (Location 792)
• The expansiveness of a free night, writing so that I might appear in my own lines, even if nobody would ever read them. (Location 847)
• You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful you’ll encounter the only other person in line buying the same obscure thing as you. (Location 909)
• Similarly, there’s an intimacy to going shopping with someone else, letting yourself get dragged into stores you would otherwise avoid. I’d go with Ken to musk-scented menswear shops so he could buy a new jacket or baseball cap, and in return he’d come with me to Cody’s, the bookstore across from Amoeba that had the biggest selection of magazines I’d ever seen in my life. I always took much longer than he did at his stores. (Location 920)

New highlights added May 26, 2023 at 7:25 AM

• Within a few months, I would understand that being in public, shouting, chanting, singing, calling out evil—it wasn’t always about trying to accomplish something. Sometimes it’s just about your voice blending in with those of others. The anonymity of being in a crowd, knowing you are there for one another. More feelings than you know what to do with, so you scream at someone, even if they’re the wrong ones. (Location 1120)
• I loved walking with him. A mismatched pair moving through the world. We noticed the same things, taking in the small moments of everyday beauty and weirdness, (Location 1128)

New highlights added May 26, 2023 at 10:24 PM

• Out of principle, I stopped reading fiction. I wanted to learn only about histories that had been denied to us. (Location 1187)
• In those early, barely governed days of the internet, the online world was manageably vast. It felt like a world you could master. There were only so many rooms to explore. You could spend a lot of time there, but not that much. Mostly, you realized that people were bored everywhere. We had come there to find others who were into the same, obscure things as us. People built websites, shrines to their heroes, who were obviously too cool to ever use computers. The internet was full of gifts, strangers offering each other candy, sharing with the like-minded and curious. Everything was sustained through generosity. (Location 1239)
• In 1923, he published “Essay on the Gift,” which placed Malinowski’s island networks in conversation with gifting practices in other societies, like indigenous traditions in the Americas, systems of communal ownership in China. Mauss introduced the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss also believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn’t just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You’re beholden to the “spirit of the gift,” a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations. (Location 1249)
• Everyone online shared their joy and esoteric knowledge. Someone made a web page about your favorite band; maybe you could go and make one about your second-favorite band. You posted a list of tapes for trade—not for sale. I used my zine as an excuse to quiz people in bands or influential listserv members about what they were doing with their lives, how they spent their free time, whether the majority of their friends were real or virtual. I never used any of the dollar bills people sent me for my zines. It was more than money. (Location 1257)
• I always felt as if my friends were sacrificing something by spending their precious Friday or Saturday nights this way. More often than not, I was at my computer anyway. But they could have all been out getting drunk, meeting girls, acting reckless. Instead, they were huddled around my computer, trash-talking strangers, and listening to my records. Between songs, when it was quiet, Ken’s clock ticked away above us. Friends from down the hall would come home after a party or a date and see us there, wisecracking about “humane capitalism” in a chat room, and shake their heads in astonishment that this is how we’d chosen to spend our evening. (Location 1268)
• At first, perhaps it was just to annoy me, three young men singing, one begging them to stop. But then it became a noise that felt safe, possibly better than the original. In the immediacy of the song, as its seconds tick away, you’re experiencing it as a community—as a vision of the world vibrating together. It tickles your ear, then the rest of you, as your voice merges with everyone else’s. The violent dissonance when someone, and then another, slips off-key, and everyone ventures off toward their own ba-ba-baa solo. I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God. A harmonic coming together capable of overtaking lyrics about drift and catastrophe, a song as proof that people can work together. We would sit in the parking lot until the song ended. The donuts weren’t very good, but at least they provided a destination for our moving choir. We were sharing something, a combination of delirium and fraternity. (Location 1275)
• Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity. (Location 1344)
• Everybody likes something—a song, a movie, a TV show—so you choose not to; this is how you carve out space for yourself. But the right person persuades you to try it, and you feel as though you’ve made two discoveries. One is that this thing isn’t so bad. The other is a new confidant. (Location 1357)
• We lived for rituals, looking forward to the day when they would be so instinctive that we would forget how they started. There was still time to repay these gifts. (Location 1364)
• In this context, Mauss’s idea of the gift takes on a new resonance. He’s not just speculating about alternatives to market-driven systems of exchange; he dreams of an entirely different way of living. He is salvaging a lost world, trying to see through on a set of impossible potentialities. When Mauss turns his discussion of gifts to gestures of “generosity” or speaks of sitting together “around the common wealth,” he is trying to remind us that there are other ways of being than that of “economic man.” That remnants of “another law, another economy, and another mentality” survive alongside the ones we perceive to be inevitable and final. (Location 1394)
• His essay chases a string of gifts around the world and through the deep, historical past in order to remind you about the possibilities of where you stand. “It is useless to go looking for goodness and happiness far away,” he concludes. They’re closer than you think. Mauss and the other survivors of this tumultuous stretch of human history are like the “devastated” part of the woods where, for a few years, some old trees “try to become green again.” Something more capricious than a gift changing hands. Something more mysterious than an ornamental necklace or carving. Something more like seeds, carried by the wind, falling and germinating. Whatever may come: “let us work a few more years.” (Location 1401)

New highlights added May 28, 2023 at 1:33 AM

• Moments that seem inconsequential until you have a reason to hold on to them, arrange them in a pattern. (Location 1750)
• Sammi described us as “looters in a city on fire”; I nicked the phrase for later use. Your consciousness was like a city, and you scavenged and searched for treasured memories of better days. Or maybe memory is more of a fire than a city. It’s uncontrollable, fickle, and destructive. (Location 1956)
• The basketball player didn’t know what they were protesting but said he was sympathetic to the struggle. “It’s fucked up the way it is sometimes,” he said vaguely, and it became a worldview that I wrote out over and over in my journal. It was as simple as that. It’s fucked up the way it is sometimes. (Location 2012)
• I read about these tragedies carefully, but they didn’t bring me any closer to fathoming darkness. I dwelled on all the small moments along the way—what the sky must have looked like just before the succession of lightning strikes, the relief Byrd might have felt when offered a ride home, how a smoky casino smells at four in the morning. Inevitably, I would think about Ken’s final minutes, too. What it must have felt like to be locked inside his own trunk. Did he lament those he would leave behind, or was he focused on escape? Trying to understand how these moments could be narrativized after the fact, either in the minds of the perpetrators or in the tales told by lawyers or journalists, was impossible. (Location 2040)
• I really hope you can read this. I don’t care if you can see through me, I wrote, confessing to a list of imperfections and insecurities. Just as long as you can see me. (Location 2182)

New highlights added May 28, 2023 at 11:58 PM

• an essay by the philosopher Walter Benjamin about the aura that emanates from a work of art. One is conscious of a painting’s singularity in the world; you can situate it in a time and place. You’re always aware of its provenance, not just that the painter’s hand touched this years ago, but that the painting itself has passed through even more hands over time, beheld by a string of previous owners. This part, rather than Benjamin’s belief that all of this had something to do with fascism, stayed with me. I thought I was encountering a lesser, probably debased, version of the aura while sifting through old, vintage things, connecting me to some anonymous listener or reader of the past. How did they hear this piece of music? Inspect the grooves: What song did they play more than others? Why did they underline this sentence and not that one? (Location 2232)
• We had a journal that we shared, and we would trade it back and forth every time we saw each other, entrusting it with our deepest sorrows and fears, writing down things that were too difficult to say, interweaving our respective reasons for sadness, trying in vain to co-author a common story into existence, until this was no longer possible. (Location 2264)
• “a world in tumult and a world in travail.” Somehow, he remains optimistic. There’s no other way to be. The only constant in this life, in this work, is the passage of time, and with it, change. “And yet,” Carr writes, quoting Galileo, and beholding our world, “it moves.” (Location 2364)
• The immigrant’s resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities. You may master tenses and forms, grammatical rules, what passes for style. And yet, consequently, you may struggle to hold a conversation with your grandparents. (Location 2460)
• We sign off the same way—Stay true. The joke that gave birth to the phrase is lost to time, but I still remember the elaborate handshake that accompanied it. “Stay true to the game,” later abbreviated to “stay true.” True to yourself. True to who you might have become. (Location 2526)
• But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased. The true account would necessarily be joyful, rather than morose, and surrendering to joy wouldn’t mean I was abandoning you. A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history. (Location 2537)
• I needed to figure out how to describe the smell of secondhand smoke on flannel, the taste of pancakes with fresh strawberries and powdered sugar the morning after, sun hitting a specific shade of golden brown, the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you, the threshold when a pair of old boots go from new to worn, the sound of our finals week mixtape wheezing to the end of its spool. Which metaphors were useful and which were not, what to explain and what to keep secret. The look when someone recognizes you. (Location 2546)

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title: “Stay True” author: “Hua Hsu” url: "" date: 2023-12-19 source: kindle tags: media/books

Stay True

Metadata

• Author: Hua Hsu
• Full Title: Stay True
• Category:#books

Highlights

• We stayed up so late, possessed by delirium, that we came up with a theory of everything, only we forgot to write it down. We cycled through legendary infatuations sure to devastate us for the rest of our lives. For a while, you were convinced that you would one day write the saddest story ever. (Location 98)
• There comes a moment for the immigrant’s child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time. (Location 337)
• Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself. (Location 340)
• When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out. We would figure it out together, and we would be different together. I just had to find people to be different with, a critical mass of others to flesh out the possibilities of a collective pronoun. (Location 522)
• We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won: certainty was boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus. (Location 648)
• we were bored and shared a fondness for ritual; you repeat a gesture enough times until you’re actually friends. (Location 657)
• You repeat the ritual enough and you become actual smokers. Smoking offers a way to build natural breaks into conversation. Lighting a cigarette starts a timer. We had to commence discussion of serious matters, accelerate the chitchat toward its most intimate intensities. Ken always looked very serious whenever he took a drag, eyes downcast, the cigarette hanging from his upper lip, bobbing up and down as he spoke. I loved practicing different ways of holding mine. Wedged between your index and your middle fingers, as if they were chopsticks. Pinched between your thumb and your pointer, as though you were about to squash a bug. Down by the knuckle, between your middle and your ring fingers, so that half your face was covered each time you drew a breath. Nestled in the curl of your forefinger, like a pool cue, so that you could use the lit end to gesture and point. (Location 659)
• The humane thing for Ken to do was to let me keep talking, because I’d eventually run out of straws to grasp at. I appreciated that he was too kind to put me out of my misery and point out my insecurities. Maybe this is what it meant to be known, this feeling of being exposed and transparent. (Location 698)
• Ken knew how to use people—not in an exploitative way, but he understood what key you sang in. He could inspire you to do strange things, and he knew when to defer. Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around. (Location 757)
• Youth is a pursuit of this kind of small immortality. You want to leave something behind. Record a single and put it out in the world, the part of the world that never dies, granted new life in the used bins and secondhand shops. Nestle your zines and manifestos inside newspapers around campus, between the pages of magazines left behind in cafés, your words against theirs. Spray-paint another’s initials in the parking garage. You hurtle toward the future where you might look back upon the intricate secret handshake and laugh at how silly it once was, if you can remember it at all. (Location 772)
• The light felt rich with possibility. You wanted to believe there was no better time or place on earth than this, right now. (Location 790)
• We took pictures of one another, all these random group shots of not-quite-friends. We were now joined by this moment, (Location 792)
• The expansiveness of a free night, writing so that I might appear in my own lines, even if nobody would ever read them. (Location 847)
• You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful you’ll encounter the only other person in line buying the same obscure thing as you. (Location 909)
  • Tags: favorite
• Similarly, there’s an intimacy to going shopping with someone else, letting yourself get dragged into stores you would otherwise avoid. I’d go with Ken to musk-scented menswear shops so he could buy a new jacket or baseball cap, and in return he’d come with me to Cody’s, the bookstore across from Amoeba that had the biggest selection of magazines I’d ever seen in my life. I always took much longer than he did at his stores. (Location 920)
• Within a few months, I would understand that being in public, shouting, chanting, singing, calling out evil—it wasn’t always about trying to accomplish something. Sometimes it’s just about your voice blending in with those of others. The anonymity of being in a crowd, knowing you are there for one another. More feelings than you know what to do with, so you scream at someone, even if they’re the wrong ones. (Location 1120)
• I loved walking with him. A mismatched pair moving through the world. We noticed the same things, taking in the small moments of everyday beauty and weirdness, (Location 1128)
• Out of principle, I stopped reading fiction. I wanted to learn only about histories that had been denied to us. (Location 1187)
• In those early, barely governed days of the internet, the online world was manageably vast. It felt like a world you could master. There were only so many rooms to explore. You could spend a lot of time there, but not that much. Mostly, you realized that people were bored everywhere. We had come there to find others who were into the same, obscure things as us. People built websites, shrines to their heroes, who were obviously too cool to ever use computers. The internet was full of gifts, strangers offering each other candy, sharing with the like-minded and curious. Everything was sustained through generosity. (Location 1239)
• In 1923, he published “Essay on the Gift,” which placed Malinowski’s island networks in conversation with gifting practices in other societies, like indigenous traditions in the Americas, systems of communal ownership in China. Mauss introduced the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss also believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn’t just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You’re beholden to the “spirit of the gift,” a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations. (Location 1249)
• Everyone online shared their joy and esoteric knowledge. Someone made a web page about your favorite band; maybe you could go and make one about your second-favorite band. You posted a list of tapes for trade—not for sale. I used my zine as an excuse to quiz people in bands or influential listserv members about what they were doing with their lives, how they spent their free time, whether the majority of their friends were real or virtual. I never used any of the dollar bills people sent me for my zines. It was more than money. (Location 1257)
• I always felt as if my friends were sacrificing something by spending their precious Friday or Saturday nights this way. More often than not, I was at my computer anyway. But they could have all been out getting drunk, meeting girls, acting reckless. Instead, they were huddled around my computer, trash-talking strangers, and listening to my records. Between songs, when it was quiet, Ken’s clock ticked away above us. Friends from down the hall would come home after a party or a date and see us there, wisecracking about “humane capitalism” in a chat room, and shake their heads in astonishment that this is how we’d chosen to spend our evening. (Location 1268)
• At first, perhaps it was just to annoy me, three young men singing, one begging them to stop. But then it became a noise that felt safe, possibly better than the original. In the immediacy of the song, as its seconds tick away, you’re experiencing it as a community—as a vision of the world vibrating together. It tickles your ear, then the rest of you, as your voice merges with everyone else’s. The violent dissonance when someone, and then another, slips off-key, and everyone ventures off toward their own ba-ba-baa solo. I finally felt in my body how music worked. A chorus of nonbelievers, channeling God. A harmonic coming together capable of overtaking lyrics about drift and catastrophe, a song as proof that people can work together. We would sit in the parking lot until the song ended. The donuts weren’t very good, but at least they provided a destination for our moving choir. We were sharing something, a combination of delirium and fraternity. (Location 1275)
• Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity. (Location 1344)
• Everybody likes something—a song, a movie, a TV show—so you choose not to; this is how you carve out space for yourself. But the right person persuades you to try it, and you feel as though you’ve made two discoveries. One is that this thing isn’t so bad. The other is a new confidant. (Location 1357)
• We lived for rituals, looking forward to the day when they would be so instinctive that we would forget how they started. There was still time to repay these gifts. (Location 1364)
• In this context, Mauss’s idea of the gift takes on a new resonance. He’s not just speculating about alternatives to market-driven systems of exchange; he dreams of an entirely different way of living. He is salvaging a lost world, trying to see through on a set of impossible potentialities. When Mauss turns his discussion of gifts to gestures of “generosity” or speaks of sitting together “around the common wealth,” he is trying to remind us that there are other ways of being than that of “economic man.” That remnants of “another law, another economy, and another mentality” survive alongside the ones we perceive to be inevitable and final. (Location 1394)
• His essay chases a string of gifts around the world and through the deep, historical past in order to remind you about the possibilities of where you stand. “It is useless to go looking for goodness and happiness far away,” he concludes. They’re closer than you think. Mauss and the other survivors of this tumultuous stretch of human history are like the “devastated” part of the woods where, for a few years, some old trees “try to become green again.” Something more capricious than a gift changing hands. Something more mysterious than an ornamental necklace or carving. Something more like seeds, carried by the wind, falling and germinating. Whatever may come: “let us work a few more years.” (Location 1401)
  • Tags: favorite
• Moments that seem inconsequential until you have a reason to hold on to them, arrange them in a pattern. (Location 1750)
• Sammi described us as “looters in a city on fire”; I nicked the phrase for later use. Your consciousness was like a city, and you scavenged and searched for treasured memories of better days. Or maybe memory is more of a fire than a city. It’s uncontrollable, fickle, and destructive. (Location 1956)
• The basketball player didn’t know what they were protesting but said he was sympathetic to the struggle. “It’s fucked up the way it is sometimes,” he said vaguely, and it became a worldview that I wrote out over and over in my journal. It was as simple as that. It’s fucked up the way it is sometimes. (Location 2012)
• I read about these tragedies carefully, but they didn’t bring me any closer to fathoming darkness. I dwelled on all the small moments along the way—what the sky must have looked like just before the succession of lightning strikes, the relief Byrd might have felt when offered a ride home, how a smoky casino smells at four in the morning. Inevitably, I would think about Ken’s final minutes, too. What it must have felt like to be locked inside his own trunk. Did he lament those he would leave behind, or was he focused on escape? Trying to understand how these moments could be narrativized after the fact, either in the minds of the perpetrators or in the tales told by lawyers or journalists, was impossible. (Location 2040)
• I really hope you can read this. I don’t care if you can see through me, I wrote, confessing to a list of imperfections and insecurities. Just as long as you can see me. (Location 2182)
• an essay by the philosopher Walter Benjamin about the aura that emanates from a work of art. One is conscious of a painting’s singularity in the world; you can situate it in a time and place. You’re always aware of its provenance, not just that the painter’s hand touched this years ago, but that the painting itself has passed through even more hands over time, beheld by a string of previous owners. This part, rather than Benjamin’s belief that all of this had something to do with fascism, stayed with me. I thought I was encountering a lesser, probably debased, version of the aura while sifting through old, vintage things, connecting me to some anonymous listener or reader of the past. How did they hear this piece of music? Inspect the grooves: What song did they play more than others? Why did they underline this sentence and not that one? (Location 2232)
• We had a journal that we shared, and we would trade it back and forth every time we saw each other, entrusting it with our deepest sorrows and fears, writing down things that were too difficult to say, interweaving our respective reasons for sadness, trying in vain to co-author a common story into existence, until this was no longer possible. (Location 2264)
• “a world in tumult and a world in travail.” Somehow, he remains optimistic. There’s no other way to be. The only constant in this life, in this work, is the passage of time, and with it, change. “And yet,” Carr writes, quoting Galileo, and beholding our world, “it moves.” (Location 2364)
• The immigrant’s resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities. You may master tenses and forms, grammatical rules, what passes for style. And yet, consequently, you may struggle to hold a conversation with your grandparents. (Location 2460)
• We sign off the same way—Stay true. The joke that gave birth to the phrase is lost to time, but I still remember the elaborate handshake that accompanied it. “Stay true to the game,” later abbreviated to “stay true.” True to yourself. True to who you might have become. (Location 2526)
• But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased. The true account would necessarily be joyful, rather than morose, and surrendering to joy wouldn’t mean I was abandoning you. A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history. (Location 2537)
• I needed to figure out how to describe the smell of secondhand smoke on flannel, the taste of pancakes with fresh strawberries and powdered sugar the morning after, sun hitting a specific shade of golden brown, the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you, the threshold when a pair of old boots go from new to worn, the sound of our finals week mixtape wheezing to the end of its spool. Which metaphors were useful and which were not, what to explain and what to keep secret. The look when someone recognizes you. (Location 2546)