The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

The words of our childhood became strangers to us—we couldn’t use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

Maybe this is how I’ll go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and crying, laughing and singing, laughing so as to forget that I am alone, that it is the end of my life, that death is waiting outside the door for me.

I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

Then she said maybe I shouldn’t make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything.

At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I’d end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat would be empty.

The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

Later—when things happened that they could never have imagined—she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?

I hope these chapters are all you hoped for; anything less is my fault entirely.

It’s also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned.

The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it—just to name it—must have been like trying to catch something invisible.

This is the book I would have written for you if I could write.

Sometimes Litvinoff found himself disagreeing with someone’s argument, and in his head he delivered a brilliant rebuttal.

How she seemed to pull light and gravity to the place where she stood.

It was years before I’d spent all the joy and pain born in me in that less than half a minute.

I raised them and let them balloon in the breeze like the flag of a new nation.

and that every song Alma learned to play on it, no matter how sad, possessed the unmistakable tone of victory.

Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. And everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them.

He stripped back the sheets. I regret whatever he may have found there. And yet. Talk about an argument. Every morning it stands at attention, like the lead counsel for the defense.