The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.

I helped those in who were locked out, others I helped keep out what couldn’t be let in, so that they could sleep without nightmares.

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.

I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn’t matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

There are passages of my book I know by heart. By heart, this is not an expression I use lightly. My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart.

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.

Then I thought: My book. Who would find it? Would it be thrown away, along with the rest of my things? Even though I thought I’d been writing it for myself, the truth was that I wanted someone to read it.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.

Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.

“A place belongs to anyone who has a use for it,”

Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

There was a shop on Lexington that advertised passport pictures. I like to go sometimes. I keep them in a little album. Mostly they’re of me, except for one, which is of Isaac, aged five, and another of my cousin, the locksmith. He was an amateur photographer and one day he showed me how to make a pinhole camera. This was the spring of 1947. I stood in the back of his tiny shop watching him fix the photographic paper inside the box. He told me to sit, and shone a lamp on my face. Then he removed the cover over the pinhole. I sat so still I was hardly breathing. When it was finished we went into the darkroom and dropped it in the developing pan. We waited. Nothing. Where I should have been there was only a scratchy grayness. My cousin insisted we do it again, so we did it again, and again, nothing. Three times he tried to take a picture of me with the pinhole camera, and three times I failed to appear. My cousin couldn’t understand it. He cursed the man who sold him the paper, thinking he’d been given a bad batch. But I knew he hadn’t. I knew that the way others had lost a leg or an arm, I’d lost whatever the thing is that makes people indelible. I told my cousin to sit in the chair. He was reluctant, but finally he agreed. I took a photograph of him, and as we watched the paper in the developing pan his face appeared. He laughed. And I laughed, too. It was I who’d taken the picture, and if it was proof of his existence, it was also proof of my own.

“Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.”)

He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down. “Come down!” they cried to him. “Come down! Come down!” Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. “I can’t,” he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. “Why?” they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. “Because then you’ll stop asking for me.”

I thought we were fighting for something more than her love, he said. Now it was my turn to look out the window. What is more than her love? I asked.

there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn’t choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.

At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

Why do people always get named after dead people? If they have to be named after anything at all, why can’t it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?