Truth and Beauty

by Ann Patchett

Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.

Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?

I came to understand that night in the sports bar, safe from the blinding rain, that I could not worry about Lucy anymore. I knew then it was just too enormous for me to manage and that worrying about her would swamp me. If I was swamped by worry, I would be useless to her. It was even possible that I would desert her, and that was the thing that could never happen. I decided that night I would take all the hours of my life that could so easily be spent worrying and instead I would try to help her.

The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry?

Things didn’t get worse after we got married. I simply lost my ability to bear it, which in truth was never so good in the first place.

The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times.

how beautiful it would be to live so far away from my mistakes.

We were all better off living in the worlds inside our heads.

I had spent a lot of my life trying to find quiet time alone, but I had very little experience with being lonely.

In the days before Roe v. Wade, I doubt that many American women were wracked with guilt over having abortions. They were too busy wondering if they were going to be butchered. So when luck went their way and they made it through the procedure safely, it was a cause for celebration rather than remorse. What legalized abortion brought to this country, along with safe medical practices, was the expectation of shame, the need to wonder if you were doing the right thing even though you knew exactly what you’d do in the end. We could have our abortions but we had to feel horrible for the decision we made, even if it was hardly a decision at all.

shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us.

the world was a blister of grief with only the thinnest layer of tightly stretched skin holding everything in place.

But Lucy had been alone too much of her life, and in her loneliness she had constructed a vision of what a perfect relationship would look like. Love, in her imagination, was so dazzling, so tender and unconditional, that anything human seemed impossibly thin by comparison.

Lucy thought that all she needed was one person, the right person, and all the empty space would be taken away from her. But there was no one in the world who was big enough for that.

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker. But Lucy was never going to live in Nashville. Even if it might have saved her life, it wasn’t the life she wanted.

Lucy was having the great love affair she had always dreamed of. It was dangerous and rocky, violently depleting, but in the few minutes that it was sweet it made her feel the all encompassing heat of love.

I am living that life now and would not choose it. If Lucy couldn’t give up the heroin, I could not give up Lucy.