Luke

Luke

I had a dog who loved flowers. Briskly she went through the fields, yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head and her wet nose touching the face of every one with its petals of silk with its fragrance rising into the air where the bees, their bodies heavy with pollen hovered— and easily she adored every blossom not in the serious careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom— the way we praise or don’t praise— the way we love or don’t love— but the way we long to be— that happy in the heaven of earth— that wild, that loving.

“When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

“Art, however, has another way of remembering, because its aims are different to those of an archive-type memory. Art actively transforms facts into past; it produces the very experience of their passing by and consequently interrupts their immutability. Thus, by means of art and yet within its boundaries, the past appears ungraspable and mutable, it appears as what the present will never be able to store and keep to itself. Nonetheless, and precisely for this reason, the past—in its ungraspable form—proffers new possibilities of comprehension. Therefore, art neither resolves nor leaves what has happened behind; it does, however, clear a different pathway for remembrance by revisiting the past, by accompanying its loss, and by mourning it.”

María del Rosario Acosta Lópe, from “Memory and Fragility: Art’s Resistance to Oblivion,” The New Centennial Review (vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2014)

“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)