There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all. Avoid.
You can say to yourself, I’m just a body that thinks and talks and seems to want its life, one more day of it. You don’t have to know why. Well, nothing could ever change if your body didn’t just keep you there not even knowing what it is you’re waiting for. Not even knowing that you’re waiting at all. Just there on the stoop in the moonlight, licking up tears.
It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar.
Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of ‘the modern,’ that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.
This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean.
She pretended he knew some of her thoughts, only some of them, the ones she would like to show him.
Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools’ errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself.
Pity us, yes, but we are brave, she thought, and wild, more life in us than we can bear, the fire infolding itself in us. That peace could only be amazement, too.
Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.
Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.
I say this because there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost like a kind of anger. As though she might say, “I came here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it.
I am glad I didn’t understand, because I have rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life, it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt or dread, and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need. Who would have thought that the moon could dazzle and flame like that?
Touch a limit of your understanding and it falls away, to reveal mystery upon mystery.
It was as if the light had coaxed a flowering from the frost, which before seemed barren and parched as salt. The grass shone with petal colors, and water drops spilled from all the trees as innumerably as petals.
Cranky old Leviticus gave us – gave Christ – not only “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” but also the rather forgotten “Thou shalt love the stranger as thyself,” two verses that appear to be merged in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
And she was old, too. For a woman being old just means not being young, and all the youth had been worked out of her before it had really even set in.
I believe there is dignity in sorrow simply because it is God’s good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low.
And as we glided across the ice toward Fingerbone, we would become aware of the darkness, too close to us, like a presence in a dream. The comfortable yellow lights of the town were then the only comfort there was in the world, and there were not many of them. If every house in Fingerbone were to fall before our eyes, snuffing every light, the event would touch our senses as softly as a shifting among embers, and then the bitter darkness would step nearer.
Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.
God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.