Pew

by Catherine Lacey

Too much light will blind you and too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?

They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion—wanting.

It’s always seemed to me—and as I get older, I feel this even more intensely—that kindness to other people comes with its own reward. It can be immediately felt. And the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty …