Oct 6, 2019
I’m going to live my life the way I want to.
The books on my night table beckoned. The Children’s Crusade. The Colossus. Marcus Aurelius. I opened his Meditations: Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to live…This made terrible sense to me, climbing the chronological ladder, approaching my seventieth year. Get a grip, I told myself, just revel in the last seasons of being sixty-nine, the sacred Jimi Hendrix number, with his answer to such a caution: I’m going to live my life the way I want to. I imagined Marcus and Jimi clashing, each choosing a massive icicle that would melt in their hands long before they acquiesced to spar.
~ Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf, September 24, 2019)