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What’s the reason for studying history? To understand the present or avoid it?
“As far as I’m concerned,” Lina was continuing downstairs, “when it comes to husbands, the older the better.” She opened the pantry door. “A young husband would be after me all the time. It would be too much of a strain.”
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
I had troubles of my own. More than that, I was in love. Secretly, shamefully, not entirely consciously, but for all that quite head-over-heels in love.
“The only way we know it’s true is that we both dreamed it. That’s what reality is. It’s a dream everyone has together.”
The Lonely Lady by Harold Robbins.
So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
Men have an annoying way of doing that. They touch your back as though there’s a handle there, and direct you where they want you to go. Or they place their hand on top of your head, paternally. Men and their hands. You’ve got to watch them every minute.
But I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.
The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That’s why everybody’s always searching for their other half.
It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.