Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.

The Buddhists say that wisdom may be attained by reaching the three marks. The first is an understanding of the absence of self. The second is an understanding of the impermanence of all things. The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience.

It’s true that I am feebleminded at the grocery store.

He had a motorcycle but married early, both of which impressed me.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

I’m always saying he could quit his job if he wanted and we’ll go somewhere cheap and live on rice and beans with our kid. My husband doesn’t believe me about that last bit. And why should he? Once I spent $13 on a piece of cheese. I often read catalogs meant for the rich. But lately I’m like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let’s be pure of heart again!

Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish,

Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business. Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

Your words are preserved in tinfoil and will come back upon the application of the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the same tone of voice you spoke them in … This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you chose to whisper against this iron diaphragm.

Music of the Spheres Volcanoes, Earthquake, Thunder Mud Pots Wind, Rain, Surf Crickets, Frogs Birds, Hyena, Elephant Whale Song Chimpanzee Wild Dog Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter The First Tools Tame Dog Herding Sheep, Birdsong, Blacksmith, Sawing Riveter Morse Code, A Ship’s Horn Horse and Cart Train Tractor, Bus, Auto F-111 Flyby, Saturn 5 Liftoff Kiss, Mother and Child Life Signs, Pulsar

My Very Educated Mother Just Serves Us Noodles. This is the mnemonic they give her to remember the order of the planets.

Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.

But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.

Researchers looked at magnetic resonance images of the brains of people who described themselves as newly in love. They were shown a photograph of their beloveds while their brains were scanned for activity. The scan showed the same reward systems being activated as in the brains of addicts given a drug.

She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it.

Why would you ruin my best thing?

“Are you still e-mailing or calling her?” “No,” he says. “Are you still sending her music?” “No,” he says slowly. “I’m not sending her music.” “What? What are you sending her?” “Just one video,” he says. “Of what?” “Of guinea pigs eating a watermelon.”

The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly. An amphetamine-like mix, far more compelling than the soothing attachment one. Or so the evolutionary biologists say.

It is during this period that people burn their houses down. At first the flames are beautiful to see. But later when the fog wears off, they come back to find only ashes.

She’s like a taxi whose light just went on.

Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Q. Why couldn’t the Buddhist vacuum in corners? A. Because she had no attachments.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind.

The adultery book says it’s unwise to make any big moves in the aftermath of such an event. There is, unfortunately, no geographical cure.

“What is the worst thing that ever happened to him?” her sister asks her. And the answer is nothing ever has.

Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.

What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.