Havoc

by Christopher Bollen

Grief has no sense of theater; it nestles itself into the most ordinary corners of the day.

going through the motions or settling for what’s in front of you counts as a terrible loss. That’s walking death to me, the years of brave-faced misery, permanently moored in the stormless coves of merely good enough. What do I do? I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck. I help them to press the eject switch. That’s one definition. Another? I sow chaos. I clean house. I change people’s lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not. Only once did my actions end for the worse. But I don’t like to think about the murder.

Families on vacation prefer to be on the move, their tolerance for each other liable to wither the longer they remain in a single location.

houses travel with us, that they aren’t merely comprised of cladding, brick, and plumbing but are defined by the individuals inside them and the marrow of their years there, and that the soul of a house journeys with us when we move.

The Sun, It Shines for All—and

Most of the new “boutique” hotels built today discourage guest interaction; you can check into several of them without even being greeted by a live receptionist. That’s the reason I was drawn to the castles, chalets, schlosses, and old-world creakers riddled with unavoidable common rooms where strangers can’t help but congregate.

As is the case in so many places in the world, beauty is a liability here.

I’m accustomed to hiding my pride in a job well done, swallowing it down the way a sword-swallower does his saber, all the way to the hilt. No blade in sight.

We all need to escape our lives every so often. To recognize the cage we’ve found ourselves in, the bars around us that we’ve accepted as normal because they’ve risen up so slowly and imperceptibly over the years. That’s how life betrays you, day by day, when you aren’t paying attention.”

A Renoir, a Degas, even a Matisse—as pretty as they are—they don’t stand a chance next to a gold pharaonic death mask with its burnished lips and jeweled, unblinking eyes staring across a thousand centuries. The artisans and tomb builders of the New Kingdom were the alpha and omega of awe. They alone could make the gods jealous. No civilization has ever outshone them. Ironically, these underground chambers were never meant to be seen by human eyes.

Children aren’t the world’s inheritors, they are its thieves, skating by on the hard work of generations that came before them.

I’ve found that the best way to hide a secret is to keep it from yourself.

Here’s a warning to keep in mind for your own future disasters. You can only withstand losing everything in your life once. There can be no second time.

Moments of extreme intimacy can often result in the drawing of colder boundaries.

Nor is he going to tell me what I’ve done to turn him cold and distant. (I suppose it’s an American trait to expect people to point to the wound that needs to be treated.)

our loss could still be counted in hours and days, not yet bundled into months or seasons.

One rule of life is that it’s easier to lodge than dislodge.