There Are Moments, Most Unexpectedly, When Something Inside Me Tries To Assure Me That I Dont Really

“There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met [her]. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.”

C. S. Lewis, from A Grief Observed (Faber and Faber, 1961)

edwordsmyth:

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving. Of there being someone who loves and desires you, and he glories in his love and desire, and you glory in this ever-strange being, which comes up against you, and disappears, again and again, surprising you with difficulties and with bounty. To lose this is the greatest loss, a loss for which there is no consolation.

— Gillian Rose, from Love’s Work (NYRB Classics, 2011)

buffleheadcabin:

“It was one of those moments that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic … Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”

— Rachel Cusk, from Outline (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)

Wings

My dog came through the pinewoods dragging a dead fox— ribs and a spine, and a tail with the fur still on it. Where did you find this? I said to her, and she showed me. And there was the skull, there were the leg bones and the shoulder blades.

I took them home. I scrubbed them and put them on a shelf to look at—the pelvis, and the snowy helmet. Sometimes, in the pines, in the starlight, an owl hunches in the dense needles, and coughs up his pellet—the vole or the mouse recently eaten. The pellets fall through the branches, through the hair of the grass. Dark flowers of fur, with a salt of bones and teeth, melting away.

In Washington, inside the buildings of glass and stone, and down the long aisles, and deep inside the drawers, are the bones of women and children, the bones of old warriors. Whole skeletons and parts of skeletons. They can’t move. They can’t even shiver. Mute, catalogued— they lie in the wide drawers.

So it didn’t take long. I could see how it was, and where I was headed. I took what was left of the fox back to the pinewoods and buried it. I don’t even remember where. I do remember, though, how I felt. If I had wings I would have opened them. I would have risen from the ground.

“I am thinking of love. Which means in my tongue that I am praying for it to be saved from never knowing me.”

— Paul Guest, closing lines to “A Long Time I’ve Wanted to Say Something,” The Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems (Ecco, 2008)

But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.

Rachel Cusk, from Outline (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)