Do you understand? You’ve been praying to a crucified chimpanzee all these years. Your Son of Man is not a god-he’s just an ape on a cross!
Things floated in the water but none that brought me hope. I could see no other lifeboats.
What are we without the ones we love?
We loved our son like the sea loves an island, always surrounding him with our arms, always touching him and crashing upon his shore with our care and concern. When he was gone, the sea had only itself to contemplate.
Animals that escape go from the known into the unknown – and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown. Escaping animals usually hind in the very first place they find that gives them a sense of security, and they are dangerous only to those who happen to get between them and their reckoned safe spot.
In the wild, animals stick to the same paths for the same pressing reasons, season after season.
It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.
Within the limits of their nature, they make do with what they have.
Strange in a familiar way, familiar in a strange way.
I sang that tree’s glory, its solid, unhurried purity, its slow beauty. Oh, that I could be like it, rooted to the ground but with my every hand raised up to God in praise!
And she prays with her eyes closed. It’s just a crucifix. And if he’s an ape, so be it-he’s an ape. He’s still the Son of God.
You can keep your sweaty, chatty Son to yourself.
It’s a big ocean crossed by busy ships. I went slowly, observing much.
Life goes on and you don’t touch tigers.
At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine – and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When.
Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone. And that is what he is doing: becoming someone.
An intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose.
I would return home to la maison, feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre, where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night. At one time, for a few days, I even took an affected aversion to being in the kitchen, la cuisine.
On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, ‘Gosh, life is racing by.’ But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.
I looked up. I couldn’t see him. He was hiding at the bottom of the boat. He appeared when he threw my mother’s body overboard. His mouth was red. The water boiled with fish.