So, how emo am I?
Just finished The Blind Assassin (Which was amazing) and I haven't this upset by a novel since I heaved Ian McEwan's Atonement across the room. Starting on the Brother's Karamazov next, or maybe The Midnight Disease which is about the psychology of writing. I really ought to find something that won't depress the living daylights out of me. Perhaps I should re-read Pride and Prejudice just so I can have some glimmer of hope that happy endings exist (Oh goodness, how trite am I?) Perhaps I should just continue on my merry way with a healthy dose of Anne Rice's word porn. so without further adeiu (sp?) some nice quotes
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast in its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle stands clear.
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
She's had enough practice by now, in smoothness, coolness, blankness. A lifting of both eyebrows, the nadid, transparent stare of a double agent. A face of pure water. It's not the lying that counts, it's evading the necessity for it. Rendering all questions foolish in advance.
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out, enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.
A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quality;nothing, rendered edible. I wonder if they might be used--metaphorically, of course-- to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothing ness transmute it into being.
So there you have it kids Dunkin Donuts munchins---> God. debate ended
If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.
When you're young you think everything you do is disposable. you move form now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too-- leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
breakfasts, picnics, ocean voyages, costume balls, newspapers, boating on the river. Such items do not assort very well with tragedy. But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the plummet of the car from the bridge.
The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill, also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past--the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
I could have stopped there. I could have chosen ignorance, but I did what you would have done--what you've already done, if you've read this far. I chose knowledge instead.
Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, form those who have departed us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.
But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonimity--confession without penance, truth without consequences--it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.
Those of us who have such evidence can scarcely complain if the strangers come along long afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyuers, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others. But only locked. the rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire.
I shouldn't have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial of some kind. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.
Lest we forget. Remember me. To you from failing hands we throw. Cries of thirsty ghosts.
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast in its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle stands clear.
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.
She's had enough practice by now, in smoothness, coolness, blankness. A lifting of both eyebrows, the nadid, transparent stare of a double agent. A face of pure water. It's not the lying that counts, it's evading the necessity for it. Rendering all questions foolish in advance.
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out, enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.
A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quality;nothing, rendered edible. I wonder if they might be used--metaphorically, of course-- to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothing ness transmute it into being.
So there you have it kids Dunkin Donuts munchins---> God. debate ended
If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.
When you're young you think everything you do is disposable. you move form now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too-- leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
breakfasts, picnics, ocean voyages, costume balls, newspapers, boating on the river. Such items do not assort very well with tragedy. But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the plummet of the car from the bridge.
The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill, also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past--the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
I could have stopped there. I could have chosen ignorance, but I did what you would have done--what you've already done, if you've read this far. I chose knowledge instead.
Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, form those who have departed us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.
But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonimity--confession without penance, truth without consequences--it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.
Those of us who have such evidence can scarcely complain if the strangers come along long afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyuers, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others. But only locked. the rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire.
I shouldn't have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial of some kind. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.
Lest we forget. Remember me. To you from failing hands we throw. Cries of thirsty ghosts.
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.