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Tell me where it hurts, she’d say. Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where. But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.
It’s August, far too hot. Humidity drifts over them in an invisible mist. Four in the afternoon, the light like melted butter.
She’s dropped a glove, it’s by her foot. He’s keeping an eye on it. If she walks away forgetting it, he’ll claim it. Inhale her, in her absence.
What is the real breath of a man – the breathing out or the breathing in? Such was the nature of the gods.
we sang “O Canada!,”the words to which I can never remember because they keep changing them. Nowadays they do some of it in French, which once would have been unheard of.
Up they trooped, solemn and radiant, in many sizes, all beautiful as only the young can be beautiful. Even the ugly ones were beautiful, even the surly ones, the fat ones, even the spotty ones. None of them understands this – how beautiful they are. But nevertheless they’re irritating, the young.
Bey liked this
There’s nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.
When I look in the mirror I see an old woman; or not old, because nobody is allowed to be old any more. Older, then. Sometimes I see an older woman who might look like the grandmother I never knew, or like my own mother, if she’d managed to reach this age. But sometimes I see instead the young girl’s face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face,
She who pays the undertaker calls the tune.
History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
My bones have been aching again, as they often do in humid weather. They ache like history: things long done with, that still reverberate as pain.
any life is a rubbish dump even while it’s being lived, and more so afterwards. But if a rubbish dump, a surprisingly small one; when you’ve cleared up after the dead, you know how few green plastic garbage bags you yourself are likely to take up in your turn.
she was getting long in the tooth by then – she must have been twenty-three, which was counted over the hill in those days.)
Adelia died in 1913, of cancer – an unnamed and therefore most likely gynecological variety. During the last month of Adelia’s illness, Reenie’s mother was brought in as extra help in the kitchen, and Reenie along with her; she was thirteen by then, and the whole thing made a deep impression on her. “The pain was so bad they’d have to give her morphine, every four hours, they had the nurses around the clock. But she wouldn’t stay in bed, she’d bite the bullet, she was always up and beautifully dressed as usual, even though you could tell she was half out of her mind.
Beneath the surfaces of things was the unsaid, boiling slowly.
From a financial point of view, the war was a miraculous fire: a huge, alchemical conflagration, the rising smoke of which transformed itself into money.
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
think of my heart as my companion on an endless forced march, the two of us roped together, unwilling conspirators in some plot or tactic we’ve got no handle on. Where are we going? Towards the next day. It hasn’t escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it’s like love, or a certain kind of it.
There’s a smell in the room, of rotting planks and spilled vinegar and sour wool trousers and old meat and one shower a week, of scrimping and cheating and resentment.
This new friend has intellectual interests, she thinks. Also more money. Therefore less trustworthy.
O lente, lente currite noctis equi! What? Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night. It’s from Ovid, she says. In Latin the line goes at a slow gallop.
Why are they the horses of the night? They pull Time’s chariot. He’s with his mistress. It means he wants the night to stretch out, so he can spend more time with her.
I did remember the wrongness of her bed when she was suddenly no longer in it: how empty it had seemed. The way the afternoon light came slantwise in through the window and fell so silently across the hardwood floor, the dust motes floating in it like mist. The smell of beeswax furniture polish, and of wilted chrysanthemums, and the lingering aroma of bedpan and disinfectant. I could remember her absence, now, much better than her presence.
How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons – the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities. And I do have them back, in a way; except now there won’t be much of whatever happens next.
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point
More and more I feel like a letter – deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.
The speech never said much, but you could read between the lines. “Reason to be pleased” was good; “grounds for optimism” was bad.
As everyone knew, you had to put on a better show for your enemies than for your friends,
What does it mean, anyway – family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings.
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.
To pronounce the name of the dead is to make them live again, said the ancient Egyptians: not always what one might wish.
There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude.)
Faute de mieux,
the military analogy that an officer should not expect his men to perform any job he could not perform himself.
“A stitch in time saves nine.”
Being Laura, I thought, was like being tone deaf: the music played and you heard something, but it wasn’t what everyone else heard.
I know what’s coming: slush, darkness, flu, black ice, wind, salt stains on boots. But still there’s a sense of anticipation: you tense for the combat. Winter is something you can go out into, confront, then foil by retreating back indoors.
I expect Father could see a point to charm in some quarters, but he hadn’t instilled any of it in us. He’d wanted us to be more like boys, and now we were. You don’t teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.
“It’s all right to show boredom,” she said. “Just never show fear.
If someone makes a remark that’s insulting to you, say Excuse me? as if you haven’t heard; nine times out of ten they won’t have the face to repeat it.
Always look as if you have something better to do, but never show impatience.
Grace comes from indifference.”
People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.
He can smell the scent they’ve rubbed on her; it smells of funeral biers, those of young women who’ve died unwed. Wasted sweetness.
Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don’t have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they’re forced at spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely;
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.
