There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

I should say—or maybe I shouldn’t, but I will—that I do not recommend this life to anyone. Not that mine is worse than any other, just that it is the only life I know well enough to speak on with some authority and so I say: Don’t do it. That is also what I would have told my mother and my father when they got the idea of me in the first place but, of course, no one asked for my opinion (or yours, as you are here with me). Now the milk is spilled and we can cry over it—we should cry over it—but we can also find some use for all that milk down on our floor. If, for example, you find yourself in a dark confusing period of history, when the gods have ceased to be and the Christ has not yet come and man stands alone, you will have some sense of how things fall apart and a dim view as to how they might be put back together. You will know that it is hard to draw a clear line between this falling-apart and that putting-together; impossible to stop the one or to prophesy the other. You will know, when you look back on the other times you stood alone, that the question is not whether you are alone but whether you are standing. You do need a place to stand.