In the old days, the snow would drift up to the eaves of the roofs and people would be trapped in their houses and starve to death, they wouldn’t be found until spring.
Looks kind of like a menu.
She was sitting quietly on the bank of a stream with her feet in the water, her robe perfectly white, and no blood anywhere except for her hair. It was dark, and clotted, completely soaked. As if she’s tried to dye it red.
And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and seven pillars of wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side – tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.
You don’t need a point. The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own.
But – just when I’ve managed to harden my heart, he’ll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don’t know why.
I had spent dozens of hours studying the photographs as though if I stared at them long enough and longingly enough I would, by some sort of osmosis, be transported into their clear, pure silence.
A moi, L’historie d’une de mes folies.
But if I’ve learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Aristotle said in the poetics, that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.
Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.
Outside, it was cool and still, the sky a hazy shade of white peculiar to autumn mornings...
The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone. Camilla, flushed and sleepy, trailed her hand in the water. Yellow birch leaves blew from the trees and drifted down to rest on the surface.
It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own.
Death is the mother of beauty. And what is beauty? Terror. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming. And if beauty is terror, then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it? To live. To live forever.
For a moment, as his arm touched mine, he was a creature of flesh and blood, but the next he was a hallucination again, a figment of the imagination stalking down the hallway as heedless of me as ghosts, in their shadowy.
I prefer to think of it as redistribution of matter.
Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?
I think he did save me, though. And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name. But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.
Fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.