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She thought it was her duty to finish a book she’d started—just as she finished all her courses, papers, and projects. There was a deep-rooted sense of obedience in her, a kind of deference to the task at hand no matter how hopeless it might seem.
Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.
I was attracted to it, I inhaled it, I let myself be impregnated by her way of speaking and being. I adapted, made my own version of it, let her change me forever. That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called “self”: traces of the people we rub up against.
TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.
I knew almost nothing about writing, but there was one thing I did know: for me, the process had to be as tightly sealed as the distillate in the cone-shaped vessel on the stove; I knew that every leakage meant death, that the magic disappeared if I looked too closely, that nothing could be divulged before it was done.
We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame. But whenever I’m in the grips of a fever or infatuation there is no confusion; my “self” recedes and gives space to a nameless joy, a unified whole that preserves all the details, inseparable and distinct, next to one another. Afterward I always remember this state as one of grace. That might be one way of describing the whole, people filing in and out of my face in no particular order. No “beginning”
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It’s well-known that whoever coined the expression “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” has never met a rape victim.
She was never granted peace, there was always some aspect of the world that had to be controlled lest things went out of hand. And I suppose that’s what’s at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.
At one grave or another Sally will get out a thermos and toast to the headstones around us. “Soon it will be too late,” she says, and hands me the thermos. “And that’s why we have to exert ourselves to the utmost.”
