January 2011
23 posts
Rabbit Hole
Becca: Does it ever go away?
Nat: No… I don’t think it does. Not for me, it hasn’t – it’s gone on eleven years. It changes, though.
Becca: How?
Nat: I don’t know. The weight of it, I guess. At some point, it becomes bearable. It turns into something that you can crawl out from under and… and you carry it around like a brick in your pocket. And you even forget it for a while. But then you reach in for whatever reason and… there it is. Oh, right. That. Which could be awful. But not all the time. It’s kinda… not that you like it, exactly… but it’s what you’ve got instead of your son. So you carry it around. And no, it doesn’t go away. Which is…
Becca: Which is what?
Nat: Fine, actually.
A letter from US Civil War soldier Sullivan Ballou to his wife:
July 14, 1861 Camp Clark, Washington My very dear Sarah: The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more … I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in...
Whatever Became of Me because the moon comes straight up from the mountain like the hidden possibility of madness escaped for everyone to see and the wandering stars who are said to rule our lives wander on in darkness I feel a need to lie down among the stones and caress any of them who have survived * I always looked for what I wanted in the wrong places until the desert taught me to want...
“He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.”
–
- A.S. Byatt, Possession
Religion—None. Not a speck of it. Born without any “religious brain center.” Does not understand or even conceive of the instinct for bowing and submission. His whole capacity for reverence is centered on himself. Needs no mystical “consolation,” no other life. Thinks too much of this world to expect or desire any other…
- Ayn Rand’s notes on the...
We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The...
