The Past & Present From A Posthumous Publication

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One of the doomed purposes of this book is an attempt to keep 
the past and present functioning simultaneously.

Richard Brautigan
(1935-1984)

It is difficult to keep 

the past and present 

going on at the same time 

because they cannot be 

trusted to act out 

their proper roles.

  

They suddenly can turn on you 

and operate diametrically opposed 

to your understanding and 

the needs of reality.

If you return to a place, you've never really left that place
because in waiting to come back, part of you is still there.
If this were not true, then it would be a brand-new place,
not seen before, nothing to remember it by.


Also, I am always the last person to know 
what's going on in my life, but I have a feeling that's 
maybe how it is with everybody and belief 
in self-understanding is only a delusion.


Written during the summer of 1982,  AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN was published posthumously, 
first in France in 1994 as Cahier d'un Retour de Troie (Diary of a Return from Troy)
then, in 2000, in the United States and the United Kingdom 
by his daughter,  Ianthe Brautigan.

The next Richard Brautigan page is  here.
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