More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Lorena Weisler—she makes me think that all I know of her is some person she puts on like a dress.
me. I looked at Lorena. Placid as a goldfish. But there are countries in her. She is a mystery. You live your whole life around the corner from someone, talk to her, and never know her. You catch a glimpse, like a shooting star, a flicker in the darkness, the last spark of the fireworks, then it’s dark again. But the spark was there, the soul, whatever it is, lighting that country for one moment. Shining on the breakers in the dark.
“I loved your grandmother. And your mother,” he said. He wanted to say more, but I didn’t know what it was, and was not willing to help him say it.
If he spoke I would listen, but I would not be his interpreter, his native guide. I think that it behooves men to learn to speak the language of the country we live in, not using us to speak for them.
But with you Hernes, I held nothing. I could only let go, let go. And it was the truer joy.”
But to me it has meant that, however much I held, I had to let go, too. Not to hold. And now it’s all letting go. Nothing left to hold. Nothing but the truth. The truth of that delight. The one perfectly true thing in all my life.”
He thinks he held her, but what do we ever hold?
I sat amongst and under the branches, in the pine smell and the sweet candle smell, watching the colored worlds hanging in the hazy glory and the shadows of the branches. Near my face was a very large silvered glass globe. In it were reflected all the rest of the ornaments that reflected it too, and all the flames, and the shoots and tremblings of brightness down the tinsel, and the dark feathering of the needles. And there were eyes in that shining globe, two eyes, very round. Sometimes I saw them, sometimes not. I thought they were an animal, looking at me, that the silver bubble of glass
...more
He told me ten times there was nothing to fear, until I said, Mr. Macdowell, I am not a timid woman. I guess you’re not, he said.
Justice binds the Lord of Hell, though mercy does not.
The waves broke on her body and her body broke in the waves.
She was the foam that is water and air, that is not there and is there, that is all.
“It’s all right!” she said. “I have to cry a minute.” And she did. She wept openly, bending over, wringing her hands, and wailing softly.
And yet I see that among you each man has his own being and nature, each woman has hers, and I can hardly say what it is I think we would lose.
And there he has to do them alone, but we did everything together. And I didn’t let you down.”
“I won’t go. I won’t go to the damned castle. They can’t make me!” And I believed him. He believed himself. My mother knew better.
felt very strange when he said that. I was still angry and still disdainful but a sorrow was rising in me like dark water.
We were both in tears. I sat down by him and we leaned together the way we used to, and cried a while; not long; we weren’t used to crying.
I knew even then that this grief would be with me all my life.
She thought, “My life is wrong.” But she did not know how to make it right.
Yet I was always aware, as were they, that our mothers’ eyes rested on me with a different look, brooding, reserved, and sometimes, as I grew older, desolate.
Men on Seggri, in those days, had this advantage: they knew what death is. They had all died once before their body’s death. They had turned and looked back at their whole life, every place and face they had loved, and turned away from it as the gate closed.
Nothing in Rakedr was private: only secret, only silent. We ate our tears.
Independence was as far as his vision could reach. Yet I think his mind groped further, towards what he could not see, the body’s obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality.
We dropped the truth and grabbed weapons.
What is it like to return from the dead? Not easy.
To return from the dead is to be a ghost: a person for whom there is no room.
This was our freedom: we were all ghosts, useless, frightened, frightening intruders, shadows in the corners of life.
learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle.
That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence.
Its true significance was not as a consummation of desire, but as proof that we could trust each other.
Though my mother and father loved each other deeply, it was a love always on the edge of pain, never easy.
not in tears, but silent, the way our mother was silent when she grieved.
I would lie there in the mild darkness and luxuriate in sorrow, in great, aching, sweet, youthful sorrow for this ancient home that I was going to leave, to lose forever, to sail away from on the dark river of time.
How cruel we are to our parents!
“After that, you might come back, for a while.” I could have said, “Yes.” That was all she asked. Yes, I might come back, for a while. With the impenetrable self-centeredness of youth, which mistakes itself for honesty, I refused to give her what she asked.
She took my brutality without the least complaint.
She said it as if reassuring me, not herself.
I did not know that pain, but she did.
How ready, how willing I was to crush all that long, slow, deep, rich life of Udan in my hand and toss it away!
“Come on in!” I said, pretending ease and gladness, though half-aware that in fact I shrank from talking with Isidri, that I was afraid of her—why?
“I wasn’t going to say anything about it because—well, you know. If you’d felt anything like that for me, you’d have known I did. But it wasn’t both of us. So there was no good in it.
At first I thought, all the more reason to say nothing. But then I thought, that wouldn’t be fair. To me, partly. Love has a right to be spoken. And you have a right to know that somebody loves you. That somebody has loved you, could love you. We all need to know that. Maybe it’s what we need most. So I wanted to tell you. And because I was afraid you thought I’d kept away from you because I didn’t love you, or care about you, you know.
Isidri looked away with a wincing, desolate smile, and slipped out.
When I parted from my family at the muddy little station in the village, a few days after, I wept, not luxuriously for them, but for myself, in honest, hopeless pain. It was too much for me to bear.
I’ll come back, I’ll stay a while.” “If your way brings you,” she whispered. She held me close to her, and then released me.
It is like a high fever—confusing, miserably boring, seeming endless, yet very difficult to recall once it is over, as if it were an episode outside one’s life, encapsulated.
Five months went by before I called them up and said at last, “I’ll be there tomorrow.” And when I did so, I realized that all along I had been afraid.
I don’t know if I was afraid of seeing them after eighteen years, of the changes, the strangeness, or if it was myself I feared.
“Hideo,” said my mother, in the terrifying way women have of passing without interval from one subject to another because they have them all present in their mind at once,
