When she spoke, it had sounded too bright, a bit artificial, like a fluorescent light bulb. A flicker, something not quite steady at the center. Too bright, and a bit brittle, as though she might break into a thousand pieces if she didn’t hold herself together. A million. An infinite breakage, the kind that couldn’t be mended.
Judith Kitchen, The House on Eccles Road
My current read is breathtaking, poetic, and in some turns unsettling.
We fear what we do not know. To the vole, the hawk is a monster of tearing beak and talons; only a man sees its aerial grace and skill. How many things that are dreadful to man might not be, in the eyes of their Maker, comely and fitting?
How we forgive narrowness of mind, when it accompanies largeness of heart. Yet no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling.
It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
…Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for a replacement never goes well. It’s all very painful - as painful as actually being cut with a knife.
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.
Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.
How To Be Alone
This is simply one of the most beautiful and powerful videos I’ve ever seen.
“When you are comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner. A restaurant with linen and silverware. You’re no less intriguing a person when you’re eating solo dessert to cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.”
“Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.”
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Life, love, logic, and the lack thereof in the city. ©
