She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Her hand touched me at the wrist. “If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?” I didn’t say anything.
She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead.
The heart is an organ of fire.
Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.
But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.
Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.
The word should be thinkering.
So what was better for us all? An ignorance, or a cautiousness like his, towards our own hearts.
There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.
He had been slowing down, the way one, half asleep, continually rereads the same paragraph trying to find a connection between sentences.
In my work I sometimes borrow Claire’s nature, as well as her careful focus on the world.