Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

And what opens one heart opens many.

What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence—for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of God?

Nothing would be as we hoped it would be, here in the first draft of existence.

At least God had given the sunrise—to those of us who lived on a cliff.

And she loved her meagre little existence, which was entirely her own.

The days of the present often mimic the past, like a duckling following its mother—and who has ever been able to persuade the babyish present not to follow the mother duck of the past?

More time passed, months went on, and there was a sort of slackening, like a season was coming undone. You could smell the rotting end of it.

People could return to books at any time and find them right there, those burning souls, their words as bright as the day they were written.

But how does she know if she has been changed, or if she just so much wants to be changed that since it happened, she has been pretending?

The self is ever stirred like the leaves in the trees. The leaves quiver and quake, just like we do.

Humans hadn’t lost what was most beautiful; our very small and tentative sense of the hidden, magnificent, divine.

And those future birds might be like our present birds, or unlike our birds, but they will sing, and they will have pictures on the walls of their nests, however large those nests are; and who is to say that those pictures will not be as beautiful, or even more beautiful, than our best artists can make?

Why am I so stuck in the art of the past? Because you are stuck in this situation, thinking it is the only one.

How we make others feel? Oh, that might be part of it.

While Annie had had to make up her own stories, and she wasn’t very good at it. Sometimes the stories Annie told herself went on and on, and they became too dark along the long, thin rope that she was following, and there was no one to gently lead her back.

Here we are, just living in the credits at the end of the movie. Everyone wants to see their name up on a screen. And whoever wants it is capable of putting it there.

How lonely it was at the end of the world, not to have all the people who lived before us, with us here to share it.

But that is a debt the child can never repay—to have been given all that love and care. It feels completely unbalanced.

A daughter might feel guilty for having her own laws, but life will force her to live them.

She would look at the world only in order to love it—and everyone would hate her.