Pure Colour

by Sheila Heti

But is that even possible—for an artist to shape their impulse into a form which is not, in the end, an art form?

But being unlikeable wasn’t the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.

Some people grew nervous that they would be left behind by the times; these people turned their backs on culture and took pleasure in the days passing the way they always had—with the sun rising in the morning, and going down at night. We were curious about the world to come, but were relieved that its problems would not be our own. Some people experienced a delightful sort of rest in becoming very small, very inferior, and very irrelevant, in the face of such chaos and change.

It is only those with icebox hearts and icebox hands who have the coldness of soul equal to the task of keeping art fresh for the centuries, preserved in the freezer of their hearts and minds. For art is not made for living bodies—it is made for the cold, eternal soul.

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

This igniting always happens in the very first instant and it never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains. Mira felt this way about Annie. It wasn’t that Mira had met her in some previous life. It was that she was meeting her in this one—and isn’t that rare! Why is it so hard to meet in this life?

pure colour—not something that was coloured, but colour itself! Colour itself came in hard little circular discs, and was shiny like a polished stone or polished jewel, but with its colour deep inside it. It showed its colour on the outside, for its outside was what it was all the way through. But unlike a gemstone, it didn’t emanate colour. Its colour sat there, turned inwards. Pure colour was introverted, like a shy little animal.

As Mira got older, it became harder to love him in the proper dimensions, or even to know what those were; any interest she developed in another person felt like it was taking something from him, since he had no one to love but Mira.

Yes, people with ugly faces can lead beautiful lives, and people with beautiful faces can lead ugly ones, and a beautiful face can draw you right down deep into the world’s greatest ugliness. But in the next draft of existence, they will not understand this; how one person’s beautiful face could pull another person deep into their greatest sorrow.

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. How at the end of summer you can already smell the autumn, breezing down from the leaves. And how at the end of autumn you can smell the winter, in the frost sharpening the ground.

She knew that one day death would find her, the same way it had found him—but that this was nothing to fear, or to feel too sad about, for there would always be something vaster that would hold you in its arms, something vaster even than a loving daughter. You would be held in the universe’s arms, but you would also be its arms. Was she supposed to fear becoming the blood and the electrical impulses in the arms of the entire universe?

Only once in her life, lying in bed with her dying father, was she actually where she was, and not imagining she was somewhere she would rather have been.

She hadn’t known that plants were the grateful recipients of all consciousness—not only of people, but of snails and squirrels and the sun and the rain; that it was their generosity that made them so lush and green, the very colour of welcome.

How strange and sad our world will seem to them then—if they even find out about it—that we once had to create people with our own bodies, in order for there to be, among the billions of people already living, someone who could love us, and someone we could love in return.

Here we are, just living in the credits at the end of the movie.

So you want to return to earth to google yourself? Yes. Immortality means googling yourself forever.

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. When they brighten the characteristics of another person, it is like turning on a light in a darkened room. We might remember that moment of seeing better than any of the other moments in our lives. The person who the gods are watching through you often develops a certain attachment to you. That person may find themselves thinking about you a lot, and you may find yourself thinking about them a lot, too. It often happens between two such people that they will feel fated to be in each other’s lives. They might like or dislike the other one, or have no clear feelings between them at all, yet there they are, for minutes or hours or weeks or years, mysteriously in each other’s orbit, as though something of significance is going on.

Annie called out to her, You should change! Does she mean I should change who I am, Mira thought, or change out of my leaf costume, into my regular clothes?

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.