The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

People imagined poems were wispy things, she said, frilly things, like lace doilies. But in fact they were like claws, like the metal spikes mountaineers use to find purchase on the sheer face of a glacier. By writing a poem, the lady poets could break through the slippery, nothingy surface of the life they were enclosed in, to the passionate reality that beat beneath it. Instead of falling down the sheer face, they could haul themselves up, line by line, until at last they stood on top of the mountain. And then maybe, just maybe, they might for an instant see the world as it really is.

in life, he discovered, parenthood was like – it was – living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.

When you were born, when you first came into the world, with no iPhone, no car, no Nikes or Adidas or in fact running shoes of any sort – did your parents think you were incomplete? We have a faulty baby here? No. They thought you were perfect. You were stark naked without even the power of speech, and they thought you were the acme of beauty and perfection.