"Augie," she said, "why don't we get away from here? At least while the season lasts. Let's get away from these people."
"Where do you want to go?"
"I thought we'd drive down to Chilpanzingo."
Chilpanzingo was down in the hot country. But I was willing to go. I would go. But what would I do there?
"There are some interesting animals down there," she said. So I answered evasively,
"Well, I think I may feel up to it soon."
"You look run-down," she said, "but how can you expect to look anything else when you lead such a life? You never touched a drop before you got down here."
"I never had much reason to. I don't get stinking drunk either."
"No," she said, bitter, "just enough to carry you through your mistakes."
"Our mistakes," I corrected her.
So we sat at the dinner table, full of trouble and under the shadow of disappointment and anger. Then, after long thought, I said to her, "I will go to Chilpanzingo with you. I'd rather be with you than with anyone in the world."
She looked at me more warmly than she had in a long time. I wondered if there was something we might do in Chilpanzingo instead of hunting snakes. But she didn't say there was.
Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising, if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.
-The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
