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I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself. And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature.
I never knew my mother. She was dead as I was born and the loss of her was so complete I did not feel it. It was not a loss outside of me – as it is when we lose someone we know. There are two people then. One who is you and one who is not you. But in childbirth there is no me/not me. The loss was inside of me as I had been inside of her. I lost something of myself.
My husband is of this temper. Byron is of the opinion that woman is from man born – his rib, his clay – and I find this singular in a man as intelligent as he.
Time is a zip. Sometimes it snags.
Life is hard. Hard is OK. It’s hopeless and helpless that sucks.
Where does kindness come from? I said to Victor. Evolutionary cooperation, he said. Competition alone would have wiped us out.
Men are slaves to other men, I said. And everywhere women are slaves. There will always be hierarchies of men, he replied, but to see all that you have worked for taken away by a lump of metal and wood, that would drive a man half mad. Not if he owned the machine, said Shelley, then such a man might have leisure while the machine did his work for him. What utopia is this that you hope to live to see? asked Byron, smiling at him. The Future, replied Shelley. Surely it will come.
Humans: so many good ideas. So many failed ideals.
None can know the human mind. No, not if he read every thought man ever wrote. Every word written is like a child striking a flame against the darkness. When we are alone it is the darkness that remains.
My closest conversations are bad translations. That’s not what I meant – not what I meant at all.
