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photograph represents the past without bringing it to life. A photograph gives shape to history; it allows us to fashion a landscape of feeling, suppressing whatever other emotional detail is ungovernable. A photograph is a ladder that goes backward in time, a ladder we can push away whenever we want. With photographs, we can obscure the past as much as illuminate it.
Against her nature, she wants to discuss, with Paul, the events of her life. It’s a new urge. She has lived through so much and yet has discussed so little about that living.
anyways. He doesn’t talk to the dead. It doesn’t come naturally to him. He wishes someone had taught him how.
It’s October, and the shorter days have made us hungrier, depriving us of light and forcing us to look for it in other people.
“I’ve always thought that to love someone you had to find a way to see them up close and from afar and admire both views.
These will be our small acts of care. We will do them time and again. Sometimes they will feel meaningless and obligatory. But we will build a shared world this way, paying attention to our lives and the art we make from them.
All my thinking revolved around the question of how some conditions of living were more accurately conditions of premature death. Colonial capitalism was the structure in which the former transformed into the latter as a matter of policy and social relations. Gordon wrote, “haunting is . . . an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely.”
I’ve lived at an emotional distance from myself for the last five years. My self-knowledge is imprecise.
