Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.
History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.
It was simple, and not one she’d ever found the strength to follow. The idea was, the you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are. And also maybe something about the great reluctance with which we let go of our belief in a just God.
The flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the woman, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect.
You can mire yourself in the past, but you can’t change a damn thing in that lost world.
V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation – twenty-five years at least – and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion.
But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises – grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger.
I don’t even know whether past feelings and memories deserve any respect at all. Maybe they’re no more important than a pinch of pain from an injury decades old. Feelings and memories rise and pass every day, like the weather. Only important at the moment. Why not just notice them and let them go?
Mostly the colors of that land stuck to shades of red dirt and black cinders with a few dashes of sickly green. And yet look up, and the sun burned yellow and the sky rolled blue and deep like an argument that the world had not gone wrong at all.
Their moral position in converting from slave holders to champions of freedom was about like a house cat on a cold night scooting through a closing door just before the latch clacks shut. But sometimes timing is all. A brief moment of history, less than a deep breath, becomes the difference between inside and outside.
How very sad anniversaries become. They are for the young and hopeful and for the very old and hopeless. A spark of expectation reveals the gloomy, weary waste.
Luce, sitting near the back, all of this new to her, likes to believe her children are nothing like a pair of copperheads amid a field of sweet brown mice.
It is a frightful thing to drop out of one’s place in the world and never find it again. I try very hard to keep my memory green and thus by sympathy live anew, or if not anew, aright, which is more to the point, much more.
Taking the life of a nation is a serious task, V says. Few succeed, even if the cause is just. We didn’t, and ours wasn’t. But sometimes I can’t help missing those days when we all just took care of each other.
When time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.
It does your mind good to talk to people different from you.
The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.
But Luce takes the attitude, when you start fretting the day-by- day you lose track of the long view. And the long view is, they need to learn to speak for themselves and do the best they can. For now, if they bag their own lunch and it’s pickles and prunes and they say the words, all you do is put both thumbs up and say, Good job.
I’ve had relatives so crooked they nearly went to prison, but if you have money you never actually go. They make you think it for a while, and that’s your punishment.
Miss Howell, I worry that the pains your father has taken to educate you will result in little but finding himself with a wit on his hands.
Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin strippd from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless.