Commonplace, Gass

for N., upon Proust

For all those not in love there's law: to rule . . . to regulate . . . to rectify. I cannot write the poetry of such proposals, the poetry of politics, though sometimes -- often -- always now -- I am in that uneasy peace of equal powers which makes a state; then I communicate by passing papers, proclamations, orders, through my bowels. Yet I was not a state with you, nor were we both together any Indiana.

--William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories 175 (Nonpareil 2000 (orig. 1968)

not so much responding to Proust as prompted by . . . or something.