s.penkevich > Books: death‎ (26)

‘Why do we write and read books? To amuse ourselves, responds the crowd, uncritically. Wrong: the need is more ancient, more vital. Because there is death, there is an end, and thus a beginning that it is up to us to restore in ourselves, a first and final explanation. To write or recount is the only way to turn back time, counter it, restore it, or control it. There’s a link between conjugation and metaphysics, I’m sure of it. It’s the first law to decipher.’

‘The miracle is the possibility of the book. The power is in its coherence that stands firm. Its unity that prevails over death. Why? Because it proposes an alternative, resolute ending. It’s a tombstone that we can move backward or forward on our paths as readers and writers.’

‘If I save lives by writing, who is the writer keeping me alive?’

‘ What formed in Cyrus's mind was a blunt and inarticulable plea to be done, for a reprieve from navigating what had become to him an unnavigable world, to not have to spend the next decade or decades unraveling what it all meant, had meant, would mean. The anger he felt at his mother. The vanished. The abandoner. But, also, the pride he felt for her, now. The great artist. It was too much. He prayed for an end to the tyranny of all symbols, beginning with language…

He understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived, that art and writing had gotten him only trivially closer to compensating for that fundamental detectiveness, the way standing on a roof gets one only trivially closer to grabbing the moon than standing in the dirt.’

‘But that's a misunderstanding of grace, which doesn't ask to be paid back. Even when you ve been given the gift twice, emerged from your own death to run away from your husband. Leaving him to grieve you, to raise your child by himself.’

‘When I learned how to say "cigarette," I walked around saying it to myself like a prayer, like an incantation. see-GARR-ett. It was my favorite word. If I walked up to someone and said it, one time in every five they'd hand me one. Language could make a meal like that.’

‘This idea for the book, for his own dying going into the museum he'd had a grasp of its shape, why it mattered. It was a tidy, gallant idea about leaving life for something larger than mere living. Becoming an earth martyr. It made sense, and then suddenly it didn't. It held a shape and then suddenly it didn't.’

‘I expect great things of you, Margaret Murphy. Because you have suffered. There will come a day when you will get your chance. You will atone. You will save a life. You will change the world for the better. I believe it. I’ve prayed over it. One day God is going to put the chance right there in front of you.’

‘My idea of God was very fairy tale-like. Sometimes it was mixed up with The Wizard of Oz. So, it seemed very natural to me to write that way. A child would have this fairy tale-like understanding of the world, and of God, and of sin and forgiveness…Catholicism has zero answers for this little girl. If you’re 4 and you kill someone, that’s not a sin. You’re not capable of mortal sin. So, how could she even confess it? It’s outside of the religion entirely. And yet, of course, she’s gonna carry that guilt forward forever. So, I wanted to explore that too, the way faith totally fails her. It has no answers for her.’

‘When I finally did find a way to untie that impossible knot, then all the most important questions in life would be answered. Why we love. Why we suffer. How we make sense of the happenings in our lives. The stories we tell ourselves to make it through to the next day. Why we press on, even after all hope is lost.’

‘He believes that the sacramental host cleanses him of all impurity and redeems him of all imperfection. And so, by eating Christ’s flesh and drinking His blood, he feels part of Christ. But it never occurred to him that by eating the flesh of those cattle and drinking their blood, he would also become part of the animals he slaughters every day.’

‘There are no return trips on this line,” the woman said softly. “Once you get to the ninth kingdom, there is no going back. It is the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will. It has many names.’

‘I like to play with the form. I thought, well, why not break in as myself and talk about things that have happened to me that I can't explain away? So I was showing that I've got some skin in the game here, that these things have been part of my reality, and I don't understand it. And simply, I have to live with it. And, you know, we're in a world now that's always looking for easy answers, quick-fire solutions. Nobody likes to say, I don't know. And this is a book about saying, I don't know. And when it comes to the supernatural, I think that's the most honest answer.’

‘Death, though, is a different reality. You are dissolved. Into what? Into time, into space, into the leaky container that is me, who will also dissolve into time, into space. No. 80 on the PeriodicTable, you are gone. But before I take up my role as the long-suffering one – the gold-band-wearing survivor who was always there and is still – I am aware that mercury makes possible the extraction of gold from poorer-quality ores. You brought out the best in me.’

‘Home is inside us as well as outside us. An image we hold in our minds. Some people like to say that when we die we are going home. But it’s a strange home. We never visit it, until we do, and when we do, we never return.’

When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy.

The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water.

ll the things are normal things but they have become somehow dignified, and golden, and heavy as though they weighed much much more than themselves and at the same time had no weight

The sea doesn’t want you, he says
and Peter wipes the tears away
Now all that’s left is earth, Peter says

[Olai] will be the father of a little fellow who will also be named Johannes, after his father. There is a God, yet, Olai thinks. But he is far away, and he is very close. And he is not all-knowing and not all-powerful. And it is not this God who rules over the world and humankind…

The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women.

So there was no excuse, nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel.

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; repute faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed…but it was over; thank Heaven – over. It was June…and everywhere, thought it was still early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats…

Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.

A murderer, nothing more.

A murderer, nothing more.

We mourn our father, for example, but we are left with a legacy, his house, his money and his worldly goods, which we would have to give back to him were he to return, which would put us in a very awkward position and cause us great distress. We might mourn a wife or a husband, but sometimes we discover, although this may take a while, that we live more happily and more comfortably without them or, if we are not too advanced in years, that we can begin anew, with the whole of humanity at our disposal, as it was when we were young; the possibility of choosing without making the old mistakes; the relief of not having to put up with certain annoying habits, because there is always something that annoys us about the person who is always there, at our side or in front or behind or ahead, because marriage surrounds and encircles. We mourn a great writer or a great artist when he or she dies, but there is a certain joy to be had from knowing that the world has become a little more vulgar and a little poorer, and that our own vulgarity and poverty will thus be better hidden or disguised; that he or she is no longer there to underline our own relative mediocrity; that talent in general has taken another step towards disappearing from the face of the earth or slipping further back into the past, from which it should never emerge, where it should remain imprisoned so as not to affront us except perhaps retrospectively, which is less wounding and more bearable. I am speaking of the majority, of course, not everyone.

The worst thing that can happen to anyone, worse than death itself, and the worst thing one can make others dois to return from the place from which no one returns, to come back to life at the wrong time, when you are no longer expected, when it is too late and inappropriate, when the living have assumed you are over and done with and have continued or taken up their lives again, leaving no room for you at all.

I would never know more than what he told me, and so I would never know anything for sure…

Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true.

El enamoramiento - the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I’m referring to the noun, the concept… it’s very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness. That’s the determining factor, they break down our objectivity and disarm us in perpetuity, so that we can in over every dispute…

[T]hey have merely been overcome or motivated by weariness and a desire to be whole, by their inability to continue lying or keeping silent, to go on remembering what they experienced and did as well as what they imagined, to go on remembering their transformed or invented lives as well as those they actually lived, to forget what really happened and to replace it with a fiction.

’The banana plant looks like a tree, just a big plant that has flowers without sex organs and fruit without seeds. Therefore… when the banana plant has lost its fruit, it dies. It was the meaninglessness of this cycle that made Buddha love the banana plant, which he believed symbolized the hopelessness of all earthly endeavors.’