The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

I fell to my knees. I thought: I didn’t live forever. A minute passed. Another minute. Another. I clawed at the floor, pulling myself along toward the phone.

I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible. (We ran so hard we thought we would spit blood: to me that is the sound of childhood, heavy breathing and shoes scraping the hard earth.) Stiffness of the fingers is the dream of childhood as it’s been returned to me at the end of my life.

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.

When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?

the boy became a man who became invisible. In this way, he escaped death.

After all, what does it mean for a man to hide one more thing when he has vanished completely?

Even when I was too old to continue hoping, I still did.

when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in. I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back.

It’s barely alive, but it is alive.

sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. 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.

“He used to throw you up in the air and catch you.” “How’d he know he wouldn’t drop me?” “He just knew.”

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

for a moment he forgot the danger he was in, grateful for the world which purposefully puts divisions in place so that we can overcome them, feeling the joy of getting closer, even if deep down we can never forget the sadness of our insurmountable differences.

suddenly filled with a longing he hadn’t known he’d been carrying around inside of him for years—came to life,

during the first moments of sadness that seemed to slip in through the open window without our noticing, disturbing the rarefied atmosphere that comes with the beginning of love,

Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.

The next table over there was a girl with blue hair leaning over a notebook and chewing on a ballpoint pen, and at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him, The plural of elf is elves. A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of coffee like a normal person. I wanted to shout out: The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

To be part of it all

listen! It hit me how good it is to be alive. Alive! And I wanted to tell you. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m saying life is a thing of beauty, Bruno. A thing of beauty and a joy forever.

He slid a piece of paper under the door. It said: LIFE IS BUTIFUL. I pushed it back out. He pushed it back in. I pushed it out, he pushed it in. Out, in, out, in. I stared at it. LIFE IS BUTIFUL. I thought, Perhaps it is. Perhaps that is the word for life.

You change and then you change again.

Fishl the tzaddik who might have been an idiot once said: A single rip is harder to bear than a hundred rips.

THE ETERNAL DISAPPOINTMENT OF LIFE AS IT IS

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

So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves.

There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bundle of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence.

Liberation is just the means of attaining freedom; it’s not synonymous with it!

A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in any way original

mouthing the words as if they were not an announcement of death, but a prayer for life. As if just by saying them, he could keep his friend safe from the angel of death, the force of his breath alone keeping its wings pinned for a moment more, a moment more— until it gave up and left his friend alone.

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.

What in the world could you offer a girl like that, don’t be a fool, you’ve let yourself fall apart, the pieces have got lost, and now there’s nothing left to give, you can’t hide it forever, sooner or later she’ll figure out the truth: you’re a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you’re empty.

then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father—to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I.

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.

there’s a serenity in his face, a sense of something that’s survived its own ruin.”

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement. Sometimes I think: I am older than this tree, older than this bench, older than the rain. And yet. I’m not older than the rain. It’s been falling for years and after I go it will keep on falling.

At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. I lived. It wasn’t easy. And yet. I found out how little is unbearable.

There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.

There’s even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.

What if the things I believed were possible were really impossible, and the things I believed were impossible were really not?