Weather by Jenny Offill.
Title: Weather.
Author: Jenny Offill.
Genre: Fiction, politics, ecology.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2020.
Summary: Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink. She has always played this role to her divorced mother and recovering-addict brother. But everyone who writes in to the show is either crazy or depressed, and soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. Set against the turbulent backdrop of the 2016 election, the reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows.
My rating: 7/10.
My review:
NOTES FROM A TOWN MEETING IN MILFORD, CONNECTICUT, 1640:
Voted, that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.
♥ "Do you ever wish you were thirty again?" asks the lonely heart engineer. "No, never," I say. I tell him that old joke about going backward.
We don't serve time travelers here.
A time traveler walks into the bar.
♥ The cover promises tips for helping depressive people.
What to say:
I'm sorry that you're in so much pain. I am not going to leave you. I am going to take care of myself, so you don't need to worry that your pain might hurt me.
What not to say:
Have you tried chamomile tea?
♥ My mother calls and speaks to me of the light, the vine, the living bread.
♥ I'm out of breath, sweaty, sad. I kiss Eli's head, trying to undo the rush. Why didn't I have more kids so I could have more chances?
♥ One good thing about being addicted to sleeping pills is that they don't call it "addicted"; they call it "habituated."
♥ The fancy preschool still sends us the newsletter. This one features a list of the top ten fears reported by their students. Darkness doesn't make the cut. Blood, sharks, and loneliness are 8, 9, and 10.
..My #1 fear is the acceleration of days. NO such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.
♥ I walk to the subway, trying to think about the world.
Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?
♥ Eli was enamored with her. He wanted me to wear nicer clothes. He wanted me to teach him the foreign names of fruit. One day I brought him an orange (in French: orange). I told him he could take the test if he wanted, but that there would be, of course, no pricey tutors.
A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you're my mother? Sometimes you don't seem like a good enough person.
He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don't know, once or twice a day.
♥ The mostly enlightened woman was there on a cushion. I'd wondered what happened to her. At the end, she asked Margot a question or what she seemed to think was a question.
"I have been fortunate enough to spend a great deal of time in the melted ego world. But I find I have trouble coming back to the differentiated world, the one you were just talking about where you have to wash the dishes and take out the garbage."
She was very pregnant, six months maybe. Oh, don't worry, I thought, the differentiated world is coming for your ass.
♥ ..there's something buzzing around the room. I can't see it, but I can hear it hurling itself against the glass. A bee maybe, or a wasp. Over there, on the blinds, I think. I capture it with the aid of a cup and an index card.
Quiet in the cup. Hard to believe that isn't joy, the way it flies away when I fling it out the window.
♥ The geologist being interviewed speaks quickly, sweeping through millions and millions of years in a moment. The Age of Birds has passed, he says. Also of Reptiles. Also of Flowering Plants. Holocene was the name of our age. Holocene, which meant "now."
♥ Sometimes I like to ask my boss about little patterns I notice at the library. She has worked here for twenty years. She sees everyone and everything. So how come three different people came in today and wanted to put up flyers about beekeeping? But this time Lorraine just shrugs. "Some things are in the air, they float around," she says, and I think of leaves, of something falling and accumulating without notice.
Also in the air: a coworker who has taken to carrying X-rays around in here purse. Some kind of medical mistake. It can't be undone, but it can be recounted.
♥ "Excuse me, did you know that Jesus Christ was Jewish?" he asks us when we pass. "Yup," we tell him.
Also, we have heard the Good News. As has everyone on the whole planet, including those hunter-gatherers who live deep in the rain forest and were trying for no contact. Just once I wish someone would say that the Good News would turn out to be something else.
♥ Swept up, they called it. As if God were a broom.
♥ I'm trapped next to this young techno-optimist guy. He explains that current technology will no longer seem strange when the generation who didn't grow up with it finally ages out of the conversation. Dies, I think he means.
His point is that eventually all those who are unnerved by what is falling away will be gone, and after that, there won't be any more talk of what has been lost, only of what has been gained.
But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn't that mean if we end up somewhere we don't want to be, we can't retrace our steps?
♥ ..and we will be connected through social media to every other person in the world. He asks me what my favored platforms are.
I explain that I don't use any of them because they make me feel too squirrelly. Or not exactly squirrelly, more like a rat who can't stop pushing a lever.
Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty!
♥ "These people long for immortality but can't wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee," she says.
♥ Later, when I tell Ben the gout story, my voice is less jaunty than I intend. I make a little joke and the room steadies. But I saw his eyes. I know what he's remembering. That time the dog's muzzle went gray.
♥ Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism?
A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on. "You can't outrun a bear," the other whispers. "I just have to outrun you," he says.
♥ Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to grow old.
Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape old age.
Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to get sick.
Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape sickness.
Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to die.
Breathing out, I know that I cannot escape dying.
Breathing in, I know that one day I will have to let go of everything and everyone I love.
Breathing out, I know there is no way to bring them along.
♥ The first reading of the year is the newly sober English professor. He has been writing poetry at rehab. One of them is from the point of view of a hat being worn by a beautiful woman. After he reads it, he directs some remarks to his students in attendance. "I have written about a hat though I have never been a hat," he says. Later, as we are boxing up the unsold books, I find a card someone has left for him.
You've received this card because your privilege is showing.
Your words/actions are making others feel uncomfortable.
Check your privilege.
[✓] White
[✓] Male
[✓] Socioeconomic
[✓] Heterosexual
[✓] Neuro-typical
[✓] Citizen
"What do you think this is?" he asks me.
The future?
♥ Ben is reading a book about pre-Socratic philosophy. I've always had an obsession with lost books, all the ones half written or recovered in pieces. So today in my lunch, I find a sandwich, a cookie, and a note from him.
Ostensibly there is color, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void.
(Democritus wrote seventy books. Only fragments survive.)
♥ I think of the time Sylvia interviewed that famous futurist. She asked him what was coming next, and he repeated his best-known prediction: Old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.
♥ That night on the show, there's an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it's a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brain refuses to take in what is happening. This is called the incredulity response. "Those who live move," he says.
♥ It is dusk when Henry and I leave the park. A car nearly runs us over. Now we're right next to her at the light. My brother goes up to the window. "Lady, you almost killed us," he tells her. But she won't look at him. "You and your precious lives," she says.
♥ "You talk about your brother a great deal," she observes.
"We're close."
"That's not the word I'd use."
"What's the word?"
"Enmeshed," she says.
..Last week, we got trained to use [Narcan]. And when that person comes to, do you think they will be happy you saved their life? the facilitator asked. No, not at all, was the correct answer.
Do you ever take on the burdens of others? is the question five on the enmeshment questionnaire.
♥ She tells me that her phone was stolen and she's been using a really old one instead. She won't get the newest model, she's decided. "So I just go at a slower pace. I know I'm missing things because I can't respond quickly enough to what people say or show me, but that's okay. It gives me more time to think," he says.
I am charmed by her. She seems practically like a transcendentalist. I take another sip of her grass drink and think maybe it is giving me some kind of burst of energy.
She takes out her phone to demonstrate its obsolescence to me. It is exactly the same kind as mine. Mine is two years old but still retrieves things for me in the blink of an eye.
"Wait," I say. "Were you talking about seconds? When you said you were so out of step and living slowly, did you mean by seconds?" She considers this. "Yeah," she says, "seconds probably."
♥ When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.
Hahaha!
(Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)
♥ "You need someone kind," I say.
Something in her eyes then, something hard to read. Finally, it registers. She feels sorry for me and for all the rest who have thrown in their lot with kindness and decency. "Sure, sure, I suppose I could go for someone safe," she says. "But I've never felt this before. Never."
But no one is safe, I want to tell her. Safe?
♥ ..she always told me I had no game. She said this because allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. Allegedly this is not a best practice. But it makes a date so much less boring. Do you, did you, will you? I just want to know.
♥ I have to go to work, says he, says me, says everybody.
♥ "I'm going to do it wrong," my brother tells me. "I can feel all the wrong thoughts coming. What if I mess it up?" he wants to know. He is smoking now, one cigarette after another after another. "You will be forgiven."
♥ Ben told me that in Greek culture it has historically been considered both a duty and an honor to take care of strangers. You can see it with the villagers. The way they go out to rescue people in their boast or bring food to the exhausted ones on the beach. In ancient times, the gods used to test mortals by arriving on their doorsteps clothed in rags to see if they would be welcomed or turned away.
♥ Anytime I think I am a semidecent person, I remember this story someone told me once about her ex-husband. He was always late getting home. He never came home when he said he would, and I thought I knew this story before she told it, but I was wrong. It was just that he had a rule that if anyone asked him for help he would pause to see what that person needed. And then he would try to get them that thing if he could. Sometimes it was money, sometimes food; once a man needed a belt and he gave him his. The reason he was always late was that his office was next door to Penn Station. They broke up because hew was a mean drunk, but still.
♥ "How do you sleep at night knowing all this?"
"I've known it fore a long, long time," she says.
It affects her in other ways, I think. Sylvia always wants to go see things, some nearby, some far away. The requirement is that they are disappearing faster than expected. The going, going, gone trips, I call them. She picks me up early, then we drive and drive until we reach the designated place. Then we walk around and look at things and I try to feel what she does. Once I took Eli. Wes stood and looked at some kind of meadow-land. He waited patiently until we could go back to the car.
Children cannot abide a vista, Sylvia said.
♥ By the time I get off the phone, everybody's pissed. Eli wanted me to play War with him and has flung the cards all over his bed. Ben was going to show me this new game he made about The Odyssey.
I'm too tired for any of it. The compromise is that we all eat ice cream and watch videos of goats screaming like women.
♥ Once sadness was considered one of the deadly sins, but this was later changed to sloth.
♥ I wish I could give him something for his nerves, but of course, I can't. I remind myself (as I often do) never to become so addicted to drugs or alcohol that I'm not allowed to use them.
♥ My husband is reading the Stoics before breakfast. That can't be good, can it? Last night, I made him promise not to do that exercise on us. The one where you look down upon the person you love while he or she is sleeping and remind yourself: Tomorrow you will die.
♥ The pros of New Zealand are that it's beautiful, politically stable, and moderate in climate. The cons are the government has restrictions about what you can name your kid. Sex Fruit and Fat Boy are forbidden. Violence and Number 16 Bus Shelter are okay.
I'm going to name the baby Fat Sex Bus, he tells me.
♥ I decide to reshelve by the big window. It's beautiful out. There's a group of students with linked arms, chanting something in the quad. I follow a trail of candy wrappers that are lined up along the sill. The top of that tree is on fire. Or else it's fall again.
♥ There are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting season. "At least most people who hunt up here hunt for food, not sport," she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her dirt road. "Why don't they farm deer?" I wonder. "Is it because they are too pretty?" She shakes her head. "It's because they panic when penned."
♥ After the election, Ben makes many small wooden things. One to organize our utensils, one to keep the trash can from wobbling. He spends hours on them. "There, I fixed it," he says.
A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but he couldn't help them. "It all happened so fast," he said.
And in the ether, people asking the same question again and again. To the yours-to-losers, to the both-the-samers, to the wreck-it-allers.
Happy now?
♥ At school, Eli's friend boasts that he will kill the president using a lightsaber. Then he says no, a throwing star is better. My son comes home upset. His friend is going about things the wrong way, he thinks. "What is the right way?" I ask him.
Dig a trap, cover it with leaves.
There is advice everywhere, some grand, some practical. The practical advice spreads quickly and creates consequences.
♥ "Should we get a gun?" Ben asks. But it's America. You don't even get on the news if you shoot less than three people.
♥ It was the same after 9/11. There was that hum in the air. Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing. In stores, in restaurants, on the subway. My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn't want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.
♥ There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if it is truly a disaster. Disaster psychologists use the term "milling" to describe most people's default actions when they find themselves in a frightening new situation.
That's the name for what we're doing, Sylvia says.
♥ There is a theory that new hate has been unleashed. Another that the amount of hate is exactly the same as it's always been. Lorraine subscribes to the latter one. The only difference is that more people are noticing it, she says.
♥ He's not doing well with this sleep deprivation. There's a reason it's used as a tool of torture. But still, everyone I know is trying to sleep well.
Insomnia is a badge of honor. Proof that you are paying attention.
♥ When I get to work, I look up some articles on Disaster Psychology in hopes of better assisting all the people wandering around here lately.
Much of the population was in a mild stupor, depressed, congregating in small unstable groups, and prone to rumors of doom.
But I don't know. That's pretty much every day here.
♥ I tell her that I've been thinking that we should buy some land somewhere colder. That if climate departure happens in New York when predicted, Eli and Iris could-
"Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?" Sylvia asks. I look at her. Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this.
♥ There is a tradition in Judaism that happiness and sorrow must be intermingled. On Passover, you are instructed to remove drops of wine before drinking it to lessen your pleasure. Each drop removed represents a tragedy that befell those who went before you.
It's the same at weddings. The couple breaks a glass by stepping on it together. This is so they will remember past sorrows in the midst of their present joy.
Sometimes I think my family just brought a pile of broken glass to Ben's doorstep.
..The pieces of glass from a wedding were meant to be saved. If the husband died first, the wife prepared his body for burial by weighting his eyelids with the shards. If the wife died first, it was the husband's job to do this. I wish I had known this. I wish I had kept those shards.
♥ The leaders of Russia, Syria, and America are arguing about who is the best at catching criminals. The secretary-general of the UN decides to give them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest and tells them they must catch it.
The American team goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations, they conclude that rabbits do not exist.
The Syrian team goes in. After two weeks with no leads, they burn down the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit. The rabbit was a dangerous rebel, they report.
The Russian team goes in last. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is yelling, "Okay! Okay! I'm a rabbit! I'm a rabbit!"
♥ Then he starts asking questions. Will he still be alive when I die? If not, what will he do?
I tell him that old dodge. That it will be a long, long time before I do. That we will all live a long, long time.
But this is not what he wants to know.
♥ Q: How does a Unitarian walk on water?
A: She waits until winter.
♥ Ben told me once that the Greeks had this term, epoché, meaning "I suspend judgement." Useful for those of us prone to making common cause with strangers on buses. Sudden alliances, my brother calls them. I have to be careful. My heart is prodigal.
♥ It's raining. The bus is full. It's reached that density where being seated feels like a form of guilt.
♥ No more campaigning, no more fund-raising, no more obligatory notes of hope. Already things she worked on for years have been swept away with the stroke of a pen. All she wants now is to go somewhere quiet and dark, she says.
Withdrawal to the desert is called anachoresis in Greek.
♥ She is talking about how dukkha, which is usually translated as "suffering," can have other meanings. In Tibetan Buddhism, the word is sometimes slanted differently, she says. Instead of saying that life is suffering, they might say that life is tolerable. As in just barely.
♥ I stay up late and try to help him brainstorm. We come up with a few ideas, but I don't say the first ones that pop into my head.
To a Brother Who Is a Burden...
To a Sister Who Never Made It Big...
♥ "You have to help me, Lizzie," my brother says. "I am," I tell him. "I am helping you." I sit him on the couch, put on My Strange Addiction.
Always a soothing hour of television. At least I don't eat talcum powder, one can comfort oneself. At least I'm not in love with the Verrazzano Bridge.
♥ Margot tells Henry that the worst thoughts must be spoken out loud. If they are held back, they will only grow more powerful. It reminds me of something my mother used to say-Gods suppressed become devils.
♥ Go to sleep, I used to tell him. I'll wake you up when we're somewhere.
♥ It is important to remember that emotional pain comes in waves. Remind yourself that there will be a pause between the waves. That's what Margot told Henry. We've been trying and failing to do the homework.
"It's unbearable," Henry says. "It's barely bearable," she corrects him.
♥ Buddhist practice includes the notion that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been each other's mothers and fathers and children and siblings. Therefore, wee should treat each person we encounter as if they are our beloved.
♥ It is important to be on the alert for "the decisive moment," says the man next to me who is talking to his father. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.
♥ "But in terms of skills," he says, and I tell him I know a few poems by heart, I recently learned how to make a long-burning candle out of a can of tuna (oil packed, not water), I've learned how to recognize a black walnut tree and that you can live on the inner bark of a birch tree if need be, I know it is important to carry chewing gum at all times for post-collapse morale and also because it suppresses the appetite and you can supposedly fish with it, but only if it is a bright color and has sugar-only then will a fish investigate and somehow get hooked to the end of the fishing pole I have fashioned with a sharpened paper clip and a string and a stick. If you need to, you can use wet tobacco as a poultice over a wound. Red ants can be eaten (they have a lemony taste); the Mormons ate lily bulbs, a famine food; Malcolm X said his mom would make soup out of dandelions when there wasn't enough to eat. If you don't have enough water, don't eat, open your mouth closed, conserve your energy. You can last three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without hope, but don't drink your own urine-that is a myth-and don't eat snow-you have to melt it first. If you have a toothache you can put crushed aspirin on it. All you need to make toothpaste is baking soda, peppermint oil, and water. You can chew on a stick until it splinters into a toothbrush...
♥ I look at the list of pepper acronyms I printed out this morning.
GOOD = Get Out of Dodge
DTA = Don't Trust Anyone
FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
BSTS = Better Safe Than Sorry
WROL = Without Rule of Law
YOYO = You're on Your Own
INCH = I'm Never Coming Home
♥ My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I'm joking, sort of, but he answers seriously.
He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It's a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody's convincing themselves it's going to be okay, it's there in the air somehow. The whole thing is more physical than mental, he tells me.
Like hackles? The way a dog's hackles go up? Yes, he says.
He tells me that at the wilderness camp they teach the kids something called "loss-proofing." In order to survive, you have to think first of the group. If you look after the needs of others, it will give you purpose and purpose gives you the burst of strength you need in an emergency. He says you never know which kids will do well. But in general the suburban kids do the worst. They have no predators, he says.
♥ Funny how when you're married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you're anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.
♥ They say when you're lonely you start to lose words.
♥ They'd talk and talk, but when he wanted to get off the phone, I'd claim that I had one more thing to say, something I'd forgotten, something important. I need to talk to you in the morning, I'd say. You have to call me back so I can remember. A simple trick, but it worked. Get them to commit to the next day, the next hour, the next minute even.
♥ I played the one by that disaster psychologist again. He explains that in times of emergency the brain can get stuck on a loop, trying to find a similar situation for comparison.
This is why you must make a plan before disaster strikes. In a hotel, study the fire exits. On a ferry, look for the life jackets. On a plane, read the card they tell you to read.
Without such a plan, people quickly lose their bearings. Husbands leave behind their wives. Parents flee without their children. You might even repeat to yourself, like a mantra, I have children! I have children!
♥ And I need to get my mother's teeth fixed. A wisdom one's infected, another is crumbling. She told me her plan is to drive to the clinic at the university four hours away. People come from much farther, from miles and miles away, so many that when you get there, there is a lottery system to see who gets to have their pain taken away. America is the name of this place where you can win big.
♥ Ben is used to my all talk, no action ways, but it took a long time to bank all that goodwill.
The thought of having to be with someone else long enough to deserve it again. That's what feels impossible. Because the part where they are charmed by you, where you are every good thing, and then the part later-sooner, maybe, but always later-where they tire of you, of all your repetitions, of all your little and big shames, I don't think I could bear that.
♥ ..I should seize the moment, have a fling while Ben's away. And I could, right? I could! I could!
All I would have to do is take my clothes off with a stranger who has no particular interest in my long-term well-being or mental stability. How hard is that? I could do that. It would be fun. Especially if said stranger got all my jokes, and liked how I never nagged and how I never asked if I looked fat, and would agree to make me go to the dentist and doctor even though I don't ever want to (because of death, death, the terrible death), and would be okay with my indifferent housekeeping and my seventies-style bush, and would be okay with us having to take care of my brother financially and emotionally for the rest of his life, also my mother, who is good and kind, but doesn't have a cent, then I'm totally into it, I'd happily fuck him whichever way he fancied until the bright morn.
♥ In some Zen monasteries, gossip is defined as talking about anything nor directly in one's gaze.
♥ "She's a good person," he says. "So are you," I say.
Then just as I'm remembering that we are all one people, that we all have hopes and dreams, I see Mrs. Kovinski coming down the street toward me. We avoid each other now. Ever since I told her I would not listen to her hate.
♥ My favorite are the manta rays. We watch them wing past. They have the largest brain of any fish, I remember. If you put them in front of a mirror, they do not behave as if they see another ray. Instead they glide and watch, dip and wave.
♥ "What's keeping you here?" he says. Please, I think, but no, I can't even look at him. All these people. I have so many people, you wouldn't believe it.
♥ A man is having terrible dreams. In them, he is being chased by a demon. He seeks counsel from a therapist, who tells him he must turn around and confront the demon or he will never escape it. He vows to do this, but each night in his dreams, he runs again. Finally, he manages to turn around and look straight at the demon. "Why are you chasing me?" he asks it. The demon says, "I don't know. It's your dream."
♥ After he left, I realized he had inscribed the book for me. I wondered how he'd sign it. There are all those ways to be careful: yrs or warmly or best. He's clever though. MYBAS. Even if Ben saw it, he wouldn't guess. A prepper joke.
May You Be Among the Survivors.
♥ I try to explain to Tracy about Will. How it was like a wartime romance. Minus the war. Minus the sex. She looks at me. "So nothing happened?" she says.
And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.
♥ Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of brewath when I get there that I know in a fkash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.
♥ "There are ancient ways of prepping too," Ben says. The mystery cultists believed that the first thing a newly dead soul would see in the underworld was the spring of Lethe. It would be found flowing beneath a white cypress tree. The soul would arrive very thirsty but must resist the temptation to drink, because the waters of this spring were the waters of oblivion. Part of the training of the mystery cultists was to learn to endure extreme thirst.
♥ I stood there in my dingy bra and Target underwear while the doctor examined me. He was well groomed with a plume of silver-gray hair and an unplaceable European accent. He held a magnifying glass up to my skin. Described every mark on my body one by one: Exceedingly unlike to be cancerous! Exceedingly unlike to be cancerous!
He had a melodious voice. I wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious reassurance.
♥ Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.
♥ I take Eli to the playground. Someone walks past with his head down, swiping right, swiping left. The buildings look whitewashed in light. The air smells sweet. Diminishing radiance, but still some, I'd say.
♥ Sri Ramakrishna said, Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.
♥ The Unitarians never kneel. But I want to kneel. Later, I do at home by my bed. The oldest and best of prayers: Mercy.
♥ There's that idea in the different traditions. Of the veil. What if we were to tear through it? (Welcome, say the ferns. We've been expecting you.)
"Of course, the world continues to end," Sylvia says, then gets off the phone to water her garden.
♥ They say people who are lost will walk trancelike past their own search parties. Maybe I saw you. Maybe I passed you on my street. How will I know you? Trust me, you'll say.
♥ A visitor asked the old monks at Mount Athos what they did all day and was told: We have died and we are in love with everything.
♥ My husband is under the covers reading a long book about an ancient war. He turns out the light, arranges the blankets so we'll stay warm. The dog twitches her paws softly against the bed. Dreams of running, of other animals. I wake to the sound of gunshots. Walnuts on the roof, Ben says. The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.