Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again.

“There’s an expression chess players use to clarify that a piece is only being adjusted in its place, not yet moved to another square.” “Oh really? What’s that?” “J’adoube.”

Today, you could stand in Firdos Square and Google how the Bengals or the 49ers or the Red Sox or the Yankees or Manchester United or the Mongolia Blue Wolves are doing right now; you could check out the temperature in Bay Ridge or Helsinki; you could find out when the tide will next be high in Santa Monica or Swaziland, or when the sun is due to set on Poggibonsi. There is always something happening, always something to be apprised of, never enough hours to feel sufficiently apprised.

I once fell in love with a girl whose parents had divorced when she was very young. She told me about how, having learned from her mother what was going to happen—that the two of them and her baby sister were going to move into a new house, across town—she became preoccupied with questions of what you can and cannot take with you when you move. Repeatedly, she went back to her mother for clarification. Can I take my desk? My dog? My books? My crayons? Years later, a psychologist would suggest that perhaps this fixation on what she could and could not take had arisen because she had already been told what they were not going to take: her father. And, if not a father, what should a little girl be allowed to hold on to?

Sometimes I wonder whether we hide lovers from others because it makes it easier to hide ourselves from ourselves.

lower Manhattan rising up like the Emerald City of Oz. I guess it would be more accurate to say I enjoyed running less than I enjoyed how running later made me feel.

We all disappear down the rabbit hole now and again. Sometimes it can seem the only way to escape the boredom or exigencies of your prior existence—the only way to press reset on the mess you’ve made of all that free will. Sometimes you just want someone else to take over for a while, to rein in freedom that has become a little too free. Too lonely, too lacking in structure, too exhaustingly autonomous. Sometimes we jump into the hole, sometimes we allow ourselves to be pulled in, and sometimes, not entirely inadvertently, we trip.

You think about how we all belong to this species capable of such horrifying evil, and you wonder what your responsibility to humanity is while you’re here,

But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes—she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view—but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.

You went to the moon, one of my uncles’ friends reminded me, when he learned I was American. We know you could fix this if you really wanted to.

When you’re young you can’t wait for the main event to begin.

What do I think about the end? I don’t think about the end. I think about the totality, my whole life.

It’s human nature to try to impose order and form on even the most defiantly chaotic and amorphous stuff of life. Some of us do it by drafting laws, or by painting lines on the road, or by damming rivers or isolating isotopes or building a better bra. Some of us wage wars. Others write books. The most delusional ones write books. We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don’t actually exist. And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess—this necessary folly—that sparks and sustains love.