The Book of Goose

by Yiyun Li

Why did god never think of giving people ear-lids, so we could close our ears as we shut our eyes at bedtime, or anytime when we were not in the mood for the chattering of the world?

Sometimes I lay at the foot of a tree and looked up at her dangling legs above me. “Climb up here,” she said, even though she knew I could never reach that high. I smiled stupidly back. It did not matter at all that I could not catch up with her. I lived through her. What was left behind was only my shell.

One step further, one breath skipped—it does not take much to slip from life into death. From life to life? That is a long way.

We forgive many people for what they cannot do for us, but not our mothers; we protect our mothers more than we protect others, too.

Any experience is experience, any life a life.

ask. No one knows how to want something that does not yet exist.

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

All human beings, unless they are dead, are warm-blooded and warmhearted, so I always find the descriptions laughable, though in Catalina’s case she truly deserved them. But her personality, I now understand, was impaired by her desire to be good and to be right. To be good was in her nature. She took genuine pleasure in being good. However, where does the desire to be right lead one, if not to the wrong place?

The inconvenience of being able to lie easily was that when I said something truthful, it sounded like a lie.

Adults often felt the need to say the right things. That way they would not feel bad about making life hard for others, especially for children.

True blind rage is like true blind courage—if you have ever seen a squirrel trapped in a cage or a bird fly into a room by accident, you will understand this. It does not matter that the squirrel’s claws cannot shake open the cage, or the windowpane will not give way to the bird’s thumping. For some—animals, children—despair and doom galvanize.

Perhaps I was born a material different from my parents. I was born a hard person, harder than most people in my life, so I have only myself to blame when I cannot feel the love of others, my parents among them. Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.