We being round thee, forget to die.
Henry. Please.” I was on the verge of tears. “What’s the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? Don’t you understand what’s going on?” He stood up, dusted his hands on his trousers.
He’s telling you that living things don’t last – it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer – there it is.
Maybe good luck was like bad luck in that it took awhile for it to sink in. You don’t feel anything at first. The feeling came later on.
We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother’s funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn’t work.
Waiting at the wrong place, most like.
They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it. “And how can we lose this maddening.
A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136.
Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128.
It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance.
It was as if I’d suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.
Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair.
I called, my voice false-sounding and hoarse, slipping the painting into an extra pillowcase and hiding it under the bed before hurrying out of the room.
Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?
It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons. – SCHILLER.
For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
Well, I’ve already got ten thousand set aside. That’s a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I’ll open an account in your name, okay?
But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.
I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine.” “Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They’re not so different languages, the two.