Books like Sadness

Art and intellect, intellect and misery, misery and trash, trash and sadness, sadness and capitalism: one thing leads to another and quotidian life is full of sadness.The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude – melancholy sadness – toward it.Capitalism hates sadness so Donald Barthelme fills his tales with absurdity and satire so all the sad things become ridiculous and ludicrous and one can laugh till one cries reading them…I visited the child's nursery school, once. Fathers were invited seriatim, one father a day I sat there on a little chair while the children ran to and fro and made sport. I was served a little cake. A tiny child not my own attached herself to me. Her father was in England, she said. She had visited him there and his apartment was full of cockroaches. I wanted to take her home with me.Such are delights of divorced life…St. Anthony told me that, in his old age, he regarded temptations as entertainment.Sadness is the price of sainthood…