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Even Auden had trouble not smiling, although those thorns of hurt were everywhere in him now; he felt like he was going to break apart like one of the chapel walls or fall over like the altar; he felt like he was never going to fit inside his own skin unless he became someone else, something else, somewhen else.
And Auden was still everything inside of himself, unbearably everything,
I don’t mean friend roots, because I don’t really have any of those. I mean the kind of roots that happen privately between you and a certain place. Like you come to a place, and instead of planting a flag and saying mine, the place plants something in you. The place claims you, it knows your name and the crooked corners of your heart, and you’ve pledged yourself to it before you’ve even realized what’s happening. That’s why I’ve stayed, that’s why I can’t leave.
Again, I feel that curl of fascination, that hunger to gobble up all the desolation around me and pronounce it delicious. To tramp through wet grass and squint into the wind and feel so very, very alive in all the slumbering wastes around me. To find the tiny flecks of life in the midst of all the winter—tiny snowdrops and buttery celandine and sprays of blackthorn blossoms, new and fragile against the chilly air.
