When I Was Two, We Lived In Lima, Peru, For A Year, And All Of Us, Mother, Father, Brothers, And I, Went

“When I was two, we lived in Lima, Peru, for a year, and all of us, mother, father, brothers, and I, went up into the Andes once, and then sailed across Lake Titicaca, from Peru to Bolivia. Lake Titicaca, one of those high-altitude lakes, Tahoe, Como, Constance, Atitlán, like blue eyes staring back at the blue sky. One day a few years ago my mother took out of her cedar chest the turquoise blouse she bought for me on that trip to Bolivia, a miniature of the native women’s outfits. When she unfolded the little garment and gave it to me, the living memory of wearing the garment collided shockingly with the fact that it was so tiny, with arms less than a foot long, with a tiny bodice for a small cricket cage of a ribcage that was no longer mine, and the shock was that my vivid memory included what it felt like to be inside that brocade shirt but not the fact that inside it I had been so diminutive, had been something utterly other than my adult self who remembered. The continuity of memory did not measure the abyss between a toddler’s body and a woman’s. When I recovered the blouse, I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go… Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think. And some things cannot be moved or owned. Some light does not make it all the way through the atmosphere, but scatters.”

— Rebecca Solnit. (via kuanios)

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001)

In the church of my heart the choir’s in flames.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian Poetry, The Modern Period; from 'A Cloud in Trousers', tr. Iowa Translations

“She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.”

— E.M. Forster | A Room With a View