Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.
It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.
Sometime I’m going to do an essay called ‘The Virtues of Amateurism’ for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It’s a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don’t challenge them.
Such physical matters were nice, yet to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by the subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted. That’s why he found most young woman unattractive, regardless of their exterior beauty. They had not lived long enough or hard enough to possess those qualities that interested him.
Robert, there’s a creature inside of you that I’m not good enough to bring out, not strong enough to reach. I sometimes have the feeling you’ve been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you’ve dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. You frighten me, even though you’re gentle with me. If I didn’t fight to control myself with you, I feel like I might lose my center and never get back.
We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us. Christ, we’re in love. As deeply, as profoundly, as it’s possible to be in love.
People mistake shyness and reclusiveness- both of those- for arrogance. It’s a convenient label slapped on by those who see only the surface of things and nothing more.
Why was not important. That was not the way he approached his life. ‘Analysis destroys wholes. Some things, magic things, are meant to stay whole. If you look at their pieces, they go away.
Things change. They always do, its one of the things of nature. Most people are afraid of change but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.
Francesca said nothing, wondering about a man to whom the difference between a pasture and a meadow seemed important, who got excited about sky color, who wrote a little poetry but not much fiction. Who played the guitar, who earned his living by images and carried his tools in knapsacks. Who seemed like the wind. And moved like it. Came from it, perhaps.
I don’t just take things as given, I try to make them into something that reflects my personal consciousness, my spirit.
Something I’ve never been able to adapt to, to understand, is how they can lavish such love and care on the animals and then see them sold for slaughter.
My contention is that male hormones are the ultimate cause of trouble on this planet. It was one thing to dominate another tribe or another warrior. It’s quite another to have missiles.
To covered bridges in the late afternoon, or, better yet, on warm red mornings.
I’ll never say it another time, to anyone, and I ask you to remember it: In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.
In an increasingly callous world, we all exist with our own carapaces of scabbed-over sensibilities. Where great passion leaves off and mawkishness begins, I’m not sure. But our tendency to scoff at the possibility of the former and to label genuine and profound feelings as maudlin makes it difficult to enter the realm of gentleness required to understand the story of Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid.
I gave my life to my family, I wish to give Robert what is left of me.
I want to keep it forever. I want to love you the way I do now the rest of my life. Don’t you understand... we’ll lose it if we leave. I can’t make an entire life disappear to start a new one. All I can do is try to hold onto to both. Help me. Help me not lose loving you.
You never in your life think that love like this can happen to you.
I don’t want to need you, ’cause I can’t have you.