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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Louise Glück
Read between
March 1 - March 13, 2021
BRENNENDE LIEBE —1904 Dearest love: The roses are in bloom again, cream and rose, to either side of the brick walk. I pass among them with my white umbrella as the sun beats down upon the oval plots like pools in the grass, willows and the grove of statuary. So the days go by. Fine days I take my tea beneath the elm half turned, as though you were beside me saying Flowers that could take your breath away … And always on the tray a rose, and always the sun branded on the river and the men in summer suits, in linen, and the girls, their skirts circled in shadow … Last night I dreamed that you
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THE MIRROR Watching you in the mirror I wonder what it is like to be so beautiful and why you do not love but cut yourself, shaving like a blind man. I think you let me stare so you can turn against yourself with greater violence, needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away scornfully and without hesitation until I see you correctly, as a man bleeding, not the reflection I desire.
MYTHIC FRAGMENT When the stern god approached me with his gift my fear enchanted him so that he ran more quickly through the wet grass, as he insisted, to praise me. I saw captivity in praise; against the lyre, I begged my father in the sea to save me. When the god arrived, I was nowhere, I was in a tree forever. Reader, pity Apollo: at the water’s edge, I turned from him, I summoned my invisible father—as I stiffened in the god’s arms, of his encompassing love my father made no other sign from the water.
THE TRIUMPH OF ACHILLES In the story of Patroclus no one survives, not even Achilles who was nearly a god. Patroclus resembled him; they wore the same armor. Always in these friendships one serves the other, one is less than the other: the hierarchy is always apparent, though the legends cannot be trusted— their source is the survivor, the one who has been abandoned. What were the Greek ships on fire compared to this loss? In his tent, Achilles grieved with his whole being and the gods saw he was a man already dead, a victim of the part that loved, the part that was mortal.
7. Why love what you will lose? There is nothing else to love.
But I know. Like Adam, I was the firstborn. Believe me, you never heal, you never forget the ache in your side, the place where something was taken away to make another person.
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Why are you afraid? A man in a top hat passed under the bedroom window. I couldn’t have been more than four at the time. It was a dream: I saw him when I was high up, where I should have been safe from him. Do you remember your childhood?
Does everyone have this dream? Are we all visited by the man in the top hat? Bc if so that’s really disturbing
What do we have to appease the great forces? And I think in the end this was the question that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, the Greek ships at the ready, the sea invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking it could be controlled. He should have said I have nothing, I am at your mercy.
death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.
Fabulous things, stars. When I was a child, I suffered from insomnia. Summer nights, my parents permitted me to sit by the lake; I took the dog for company. Did I say “suffered”? That was my parents’ way of explaining tastes that seemed to them inexplicable: better “suffered” than “preferred to live with the dog.”
Wow can relate
