And the great Now What stretching without end.
She’s a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one woman card catalogue for useless knowledge.
The stories themselves aren’t what moves him now... What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire... The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear... a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods...
The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a modified version of the above. In the demotic, in the key of bougie, it’s the promise of love in old age for all the good girls of the world.
The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom; and how hadn’t Mathilde seen this before?
The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.
His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right.
Happy birthday, friend of my heart,” she said.
Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself.
Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.
Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world? Oh, yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise.
I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.
Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see you; it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering.
He longed for something wordless and potent: what? To wear her.
Privilege is what lets you take risks.
A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. Closer, the city a knot of light between other knots; even closer, and buildings gleamed, slowly separating. Dawn in the windows revealed bodies, all the same. Only with focus came specifics, mole by nostril, tooth stuck to a dry bottom lip in sleep, the papery skin of an armpit.
So leave. What does it matter. Everyone leaves. It is not the big story in the end.
How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them.
Men were not as disciplined or as smart as women, she though: men almost always took what they were offered, their appetites too crude and raw to put up much resistance. There were like children, gobbling down their candy all at once, with no thought about the consequences of their greed.
Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.