Some days lately things made sense, but mostly they did not. The treacherous intense dreams of the night interwove themselves with the reality of day, keeping her locked in a state of standing on the edge of sudden panic each moment to the next. Nothing felt stable. Of course there were the occasional remedies to this ddissociative numbness every now and then. A book, for instance. This was a perfect way of escaping the strange, confusing presence from time to time- when she could really let herself go. But the mind was always racing, and yet almost wasn’t at all- never fully focused on one thing, one solid idea or thought- how exhausting it was. Daytime always felt wasted, no matter what the circumstance; never enough was being done. She was wasting her time. Being aware of this didn’t seem to fix the problem. The root was deep. Always the worrying. And what of that coat that must be mended? What of the dog and the matter of his leg- well what of the laundry always the laundry and also the dishes always those too the bills must be paid, the tomatoes are dying on the vine outside, they are the last- cold winter setting in and the worrying over the missing out and wasting of these last precious days before frozen winter- well it just seemed nothing made sense very much anymore.
The Hours of the Days
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We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.
— Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
— Anaïs Nin
To say the things i want to say to you would be a crime.
To admit i'm still in love with you
after all this time
i'd rather let you touch my arm until you die.
Seduce me with your charms until i'm drunk on them go home and drink in bed
and never let myself love like that again.
— Sharon Van Etten, A Crime
This is the strangeness of memory: in recalling a moment, I am instantly reminded of all the details that elude me, and feel myself making them up even as I say “this is certainly true; and this, and this.” But my first sighting of you has never been vulnerable to such corruption. I remember everything.
I never thought my life would turn out like this. Suddenly, I was forty-five. Suburban and manic. As beige and lumpy as oatmeal. Was this it? Were my best years all gone? And if so, who would ever take me seriously—or love me—or even look at me again? In the past, I’d kept such wretched thoughts at bay by drinking.
— Susan Jane Gilman, Donna Has Left the Building
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really try to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really try to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
— Ernest Hemingway
The sight of that cemetery still gave Frank nightmares. Hoping to find jewelry buried with the dead, the Yankee soldiers had broken open vaults, dug up graves. They had robbed the bodies, stripped from the coffins gold and silver name plates, silver trimmings and silver handles. The skeletons and corpses, flung helter-skelter among their splintered caskets, lay exposed and so pitiful.
That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.