Kindle Notes & Highlights
It isn’t ever delicate to live.
Now here— no where: such a little fatal pause.
It’s a pickle, this life. Even shut down to a trickle
It seems like you could, but you can’t go back and pull the roots and runners and replant. It’s all too deep for that.
Nothing forced works. The Gordian knot just worsens if it’s jerked at by a person. One of the main stations of the cross is patience. Another, of course, is impatience. There is such a thing as too much tolerance for unpleasant situations, a time when the gentle teasing out of threads ceases to be pleasing to a woman born for conquest.
Her only levity is patience, the sport of truly chastened things.
A thought is dumb, without eyes, ears, opposable thumb, or a tongue. A thought lives underground, not wholly mole-ish but with some of the same disinterests.
Why isn’t it all more marked, why isn’t every wall graffitied, every park tree stripped like the stark limbs in the house of the chimpanzees? Why is there bark left? Why do people cling to their shortening shrifts like rafts? So silent. Not why people are; why not more violent? We must be so absorbent. We must be almost crystals, almost all some neutralizing chemical that really does clarify and bring peace, take black sorrow and make surcease.
As some people age they kinden. The apertures of their eyes widen. I do not think they weaken; I think something weak strengthens until they are more and more it, like letting in heaven. But other people are mussels or clams, frightened. Steam or knife blades mean open. They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken.
Silence is not snow. It cannot grow deeper. A thousand years of it are thinner than paper. So we must have it all wrong when we feel trapped like mastodons.
Is it just winter or is this worse. Is this the year when outer damp obscures a deeper curse that spring can’t fix, when gears that turn the earth won’t shift the view, when clouds won’t lift though all the skies go blue.
THE FABRIC OF LIFE It is very stretchy. We know that, even if many details remain sketchy. It is complexly woven. That much too has pretty well been proven.
Too much rain loosens trees. In the hills giant oaks fall upon their knees. You can touch parts you have no right to— places only birds should fly to.
However carved up or pared down we get, we keep on making the best of it as though it doesn’t matter that our acre’s down to a square foot. As though our garden could be one bean and we’d rejoice if it flourishes, as though one bean could nourish us.
