Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

I met an Australian who said he loved to travel alone. He talked about his job as we drank by the sea. When a student gets it, when it first breaks across his face, it’s so fucking beautiful, he told me. I nodded, moved, though I’d never taught anyone a single thing. What do you teach, I asked him. Rollerblading, he explained.

The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wished to exist. This light could be found trapped inside man and animals and plants, and the Manichean mission was to try to release it.

The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck,

You know what’s punk rock about marriage? Nothing. You know what’s punk rock about marriage? All the puke and shit and piss.

Up until the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that magnets had souls. How else could an object attract or repel?

Someone has given my daughter a doctor’s kit. Carefully, she takes her own temperature, places the pressure cuff around her arm. Then she takes the cuff off and examines it. “Would you like to be a doctor when you grow up?” I ask her. She looks at me oddly. “I’m already a doctor,” she says.

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.

“Everything that has eyes will cease to see,”

If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.

What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing.

Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.

Let all flowers wither like a party.

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.

Floating, yes, floating away. How can he sleep? Doesn’t he feel her levitating?

she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.

Do not instruct the head! The head is not being instructed!

I only wanted you to adore me.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

I was hoping your happiest memory might include me.

The Buddha left his wife when his son was two days old. He would never have attained enlightenment if he’d stayed, scholars say.

write to close my eyes.

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.