Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

I think that first I have to get the thing I want, and maybe then I can figure out why I wanted it, or whether it’s good.

We were taught to value love yet not to rely on it too heavily, because the world of excessive freedom in which we had been made would not foster the long-suffering loyalty that love required. We were encouraged to care deeply about the state of our world but our ability to affect it personally was very much in doubt.

A life recognizes the theater in which its keeper appears most real.

a brutal reminder that the world was inside me as much as I was inside it.

Is it possible to nurture a love that is not a referendum on yourself? At what stage in life is a person capable of such a feeling?

Now that my love had no object I was aware of it in a new way. It was much larger than I had thought—huge—slow and sensitive, like a great jellied creature floating around in me, bumping up against fear or doubt or narcissism and bouncing off, gently bruised, toward a corner that might be more accommodating. I had to find a place for it, but it was too big, too alien. And what good was my love, anyway? A love in which I had lied and hoped, by way of lying, to be redeemed? What good I could create in myself was unrecognizable.

How was it that I thought of it as my home and believed that it belonged to me? It was just a temporary space that I had hung with things I’d purchased, so that I could believe I was safe inside it. And this was true, too, of everything I had believed about myself: that I was moral, that I was political, that I cared for the realities of strangers who were linked to me by parallel circumstance. These were beliefs I had pinned up so that I could imagine that I belonged to something valuable and that something valuable belonged to me.

I had an amorphous feeling around other people, like I was floating in an undifferentiated world.

Being with him, I’m absorbed with the rhythm of it. And I don’t have to worry about my body, what I’m doing, how I look or anything like that. I’m just absorbed by him, by his body. It’s entirely different.

There was nothing rational in my feeling but it was the most generous feeling I could remember.

We love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tells us how we matter.