The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I fell in love when I was twenty-two years of age, and it was a complete surprise. As if this tender beast had been inside me all along, kicking and turning, and I had not known it was there.

like a bird in the mouth, hell yawns her free

Love is not a higher function. It is the first function, it is the first thing we know.