The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Did the living matter as much to the dead as the dead did to the living?

Sometimes the tragedies of a person’s life didn’t happen neatly, single file, one at a time, but all at once, so that it was impossible to know how you felt about any part of the whole.

History could only ever be as meaningful as those alive were willing to make it.

brasserie

The definition of a lifetime, as she saw it, was when the people most important to you wouldn’t recognize the ones who previously filled their roles.

Jackson Pollock’s

The Seasons, seventeen feet wide and eight feet tall, hanging in the Whitney Museum. Krasner painted for two decades after Jackson Pollock descended into alcoholism and affairs, and one day drove his car into a tree and died.

Concupiscence

I never had an image in mind for how life ought to look. I believe that to be the most freeing fact of my existence.

Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.

In every graveyard in every town in all the world, there lie buried stories more remarkable and strange than a name, a date, a designation on stone could ever in a million years convey.

There were versions of death that existed inside of life, Jane thought. Her drunken blackouts, that time unaccounted for. The state Betty and the other patients here were in, almost the opposite of being ghosts—a body with no awareness, no memory. The shadows of past lives all around in graveyards, in old houses, in Jane’s work as an archivist. In stories.

Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people.

She told her children stories from Wabanaki mythology. About Gluskabe. About Azban the Raccoon, who challenged a waterfall to a shouting match and, receiving no reply, jumped into the waterfall to show he could shout louder, and was swept away. Every story contained a lesson. The moral of that one was: don’t get too cocky.

Emily Dickinson tattooed on her wrist: That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

epigenetics,

Native Americans referred to this as the soul wound. Some believed it played a role in high rates of addiction, mental illness, suicide, and sexual violence in their community today.