Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

Midway through life, the gods strip us. Take anything real that happens in the middle of life; the decline of the body, the death of one’s friends, the loss of a job, a strange sense of time.

They strip some people more and others less. They strip us of whatever they need to in order to see us more clearly.

Stripped of the glamour and beauty of youth, everything we ever did—it all looks different now. We can see our choices as acts in themselves, not stages on life’s way, for if progress in human history is an illusion, so is progress in a human life.

The few moments of real presence you have ever felt in your life might mean that a god was inside someone near you, using them to see you. The few moments of real insight we’ve ever had about another might indicate that a god was inside us at that moment, using us to see them.

Then, when the desire suddenly comes over a person to swiftly and dramatically change their life, it is often a desire to evade the eyes of the gods. It may feel like something threatening is happening—something dangerous from which they must escape. A person might blame this feeling on the choices they made, or grow certain that they could create a better life than the one they’re living now.

When she thought back on her life with her father, she wanted to remember their laughter, his spirit, his kindness, all the ways she had been good to him, and everything loving and fine. Why could the beauty his death had shown her not be stronger than her wish to change the way that things had been before?

It is easy to feel love for one’s child. Nothing on earth is easier. A father often has a special love for a daughter. It is natural to want to shine your interest and pride onto your own child. It is simple to love one’s own creature. But that is a debt the child can never repay—to have been given all that love and care. It feels completely unbalanced. There is a ruthlessness to life. It seems to lack balance—and in its particulars, it does. None of us is able to stand far back enough from life to see the balance that somehow exists. The child is never who the parent wants them to be, and they must not be. Even if a daughter accepts the lessons of her father, she will turn into a creature he didn’t expect. But that is entirely necessary. That is how the world changes, how values and criticisms evolve and change. A child must follow the rules of her own being. A parent can never truly understand what those values or rules are. A child is an alien to the parent, which hurts the parent a little. The child’s whole life can feel like a betrayal. But life is not a betrayal of life.

Mira knew that humans made art because we were made in God’s image—which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing God likes. Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.

Would these departed spirits, through some force of magnetism, ever find each other again? Did a spirit which once lived in a body contain something that, even if it was split into a thousand pieces and separated for a hundred years, if those pieces came close in separate bodies, could draw those bodies near?

I’ve been thinking about the wholeness of one’s spirit or whether we all comprise one large spirit and I love the idea of being drawn to things in life that are a part of your spirit and meant to draw near. It’s like the idea of soulmates but more complex and complete. That a piece of art or song or tree may contain part of your spirit and that is why it resonates with you- it was always meant to belong to you.

Meanwhile, God was hearing her complaints. My hood is too big, it keeps falling over my eyes. And she had spent too much money on the coat! And this coat cost too much. Why do I so wastefully spend money? In the next draft of existence, there would be no coats, and there would be no money. So many of our complaints applied only to this draft, where the weather was such, and shame was such, that all these clothes were needed. It wouldn’t necessarily be like that in the next draft of existence. But we didn’t know what would be different in the next draft, or what would be the same, so we sent all our complaints up to God.

Then she stepped into a puddle of snow, and now the bottom of her sock was wet. Now she had a complaint about her sock! Why was she here? Why did she exist? To complain to the creator about socks? Why had God not destroyed this draft, and started on a new one already? What was he waiting to hear?

That the most important viewpoint should belong to God, not people, made Mira really upset. Wasn’t it cruel to make sensitive creatures, simply to serve your own ends, here in the first draft of existence? Yet even in the next draft, we will still be serving God’s ends, as the grateful audience of his beautiful show. Then is it even possible to make creatures to serve their own ends, or will your ends always limit their freedom, if you are the one who made them?

Perhaps Mira had been wrong to love Annie. But not loving her had not been within the realm of her choosing.

She picked it up, and the seashell seemed to speak to her, saying, You will have so many more years of living, and the years will draw you far from this time when you feel so bad, and time will crust over everything, and so much more will happen to you, and though the present is all you have right now, it will all be far in the past one day, something from another time, like everything I have moved beyond, as an ancient seashell, I don’t remember my youth, do you think that I do?—and the things I did when I was shiny and new, now I’m an old shell, like you will one day be, so take me with you as a reminder that this present moment will one day be gone, and its troubles buried beneath so many layers of living.

Later, whenever she looked at it, Mira was reassured that it was only her imagination and her striving to obey that gave her those such-big feelings of remorse, which came out of her belief that things could be better than they were—as if not being able to bring to some beautiful conclusion her love for Annie, or not having been able to settle the right distance between her father and herself, were the only ways she had gone wrong; as if life was not a constant falling short of the many tasks that God, and others, and even we, have given ourselves.

It was a delusion to think she had created the world and everything in it; that she had made up its rules and was always to blame. Where had that idea come from? Or did everyone feel that way, a little bit, for it was actually God who was feeling it—the God who had in fact created the world, while we picked up on his shame for having made it, in some ways, poorly, and mistook his feeling of responsibility for our own.

That was why she needed that ugly old seashell; because it was the contour and shape of her insides. It was a reminder of what a human self was, and what a human life was: not a beautiful glass lamp just this side of being broken, or a lovely gold ring with a single dent in it. B...

Something happened to the soul of Mira’s father the moment the life left her, a reawakening to what he had known in the moment of his own death; that everything on this earth is forgiven. He was not a bad father, and she was not a bad child, and there could be no badness between two such people who loved each other as they did. They had loved each other and so all was forgiven, for this draft is not just a place of blessings where things are supposed to go well. Getting through it is enough, and they did. They got through their entire lives to death. And the final moments are the true ones, and the true ones are the truest of all.