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Some things are so horrible that the only sane response is a bit of madness.
The drive takes me through the woods, past firs with their feathery needles, always green, past proud oaks and birches with their queer white stems and bark peeling like strips of sunburned skin. They’ll be naked now, those oaks and birches, their branches in harsh relief against a gray sky, but within two months, the first leaves will unfurl, soft and damp and tender. The harsh smell of frost and pine will make way for the good, clean scents of green things growing.
“You must be careful with that, Roos. It’s a dangerous thing, to try and give someone everything. One day, you might find you’ve given away things you should’ve kept. Some parts of us must remain inviolate if we are to survive as a person.”
“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.” —Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
“Happy. Such a funny little word, don’t you think? Perhaps not so hard a state to achieve, but nearly impossible to maintain, and different for everyone. I’m sure there are people out there who would be perfectly happy to never have to clean, but not me. Doing little has never agreed with me. It gives me too much time to dwell on things.”
Maybe the dead weren’t meant to watch over the living but the living over the dead. I think the old world must have been teeming with spirits. Death must have been a different thing to those people than it is to us. Not this unbearable ending, but a transformation.
I had to know how much she loved him because once I reburied his remains, there could be no going back.
I shuddered with disgust and anger. Mushrooms could thrive here, in the damp and the dark, but surely not children.
“Thank God for small blessings.” “Not God: nature and its tendency to decay.”
“But you must laugh or else go mad,”
She closed her eyes and smiled a smile of pure pleasure.
“How else does one show the strength and sincerity of one’s love if not through suffering and sacrifice?”
“But I’m not happy. I’ve thought long and hard why that may be, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something missing from my life, something dreadful, something darling.
