A Year in the Words of Others (i)

November-December

And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet"

"My whole life was about her," Chris said, his voice thick. "What if her wholo life wasn’t all about me?"

Jodi Picoult, "The Pact"

He doesn’t look back, but climbs the spiralling concrete steps to the pavement. He walks past his car, past the end of the street, and on. And he feels as though she is holding onto the end of one of his essential fibres and that every step he takes away from her is, bit by bit, unravelling him.

Maggie O’Farrell, "My Lover’s Lover"

A relationship was a series of additions and subtractions, and maybe she couldn’t understand why I couldn’t forgive her because, while sleeping with Owen was a big minus, the balance remained in her favor. . . But when I thought of these things, I couldn’t keep the memories discrete, just as when I looked at the old photographs in Oliver’s attic, I’d never been content with the single image each picture contained. I’d always had to imagine what happened next. . Someone who found my album from the last trip I took with Sonia might look at that final photograph of Sonia laughing in a beauty mask, and from that image extrapolate a happier tale. But when I looked at it I saw not the laughter but the mask. Once you know the end of a story, every part of the story contains that end, and is only a way of reaching it.

Leah Stewart, "The Myth of You & Me"

That’s the thing I want to make clear about depression: It’s got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal–unpleasant, but normal. Depression is in an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature’s part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead. And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he’ll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is "Gradually, and then suddenly." When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

"My whole life was about her," Chris said, his voice thick. "What if her whole life wasn’t all about me?"

Jodi Picoult, "The Pact"

       Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead. Sometimes I wish there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt so bad the morning after. Sometimes I think I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was all right for people to come and go as they please, that there simply were no real obligations left. Certainly deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships is nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. Now it’s just the way things go, part of the growth process. . . After awhile, meaning and implication detach themselves from everything. If one can be a father and assume no obligations, it follows that one can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all. Pretty soon you can add friend, acquaintance, coworker, and just about anyone to the long list of people who seem to be part of your life, though there is no code of conduct that they must adhere to. Pretty soon, it seems unreasonable to be bothered or outraged by much of anything because, well, what did you expect? In a world where the core social unit–the family–is so dispensable, how much can anything else mean?
       There is a chill of the way being deprived of normal feelings has the paradoxical effect of turning me into an emotional wreck. As Russian writer Aleksandr Kuprin put it: "Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the

horror is in just this: That there is no horror!"
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While we are forced ahead by the relentless dynamic of the time-tabled present, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel’s load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love’s burden. By the time the animal was finally able to shrug off the crushing weight of her memory, Chloe had nearly killed my camel.
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

His luck hadn’t so much run out as jumped on a fucking motorcycle.

Philip Kerr, "Berlin Noir"

A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible ever to see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

"Me? I’ve been lonely my whole life. For as long as I can remember, since I was a child. Sometimes being around other people makes it worse. . ." 
"Really? Because it always seems…" Ray looked at him, waiting. "Anyway, what about your wife? Didn’t you say you were married?"
"When you’re young, you think it’s going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close–as close as you can get–to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you."
Nicole Krauss, "Man Walks Into A Room"

Commitment is only commitment because it has no expiration date.

House, "Insensitive"

 

January

I cannot know if this mixture will be pleasing or displeasing to the reader. There is nothing I can do to remedy it. It is the result of my changing fortunes, the inconsistency of my lot. Its storms have often left me with no table to write on but the rock on which I have been shipwrecked.
Paul Auster, Book of Illusions

He had no reason to love God, even to admire Him, but being who he was, he afforded the deity his respect. One day when we had taken a bellyful of steel and shot on the banks of the Merck River, near Breda, I saw Alatriste do battle for a flag and the corpse of our field marshal. And I know that although he was willing to sacrifice his hide–and for good measure mine–for that dead body sieved by musket balls, he did not give a fig for either don Pedro de la Daga or the flag. That was what was puzzling about the captain: he could show respect for a God who did not matter to him, fight for a cause in which he did not believe, get drunk with an enemy, or die for an officer or a king he scorned.
Arturo Perez-Reverte, Purity of Blood
 
I hate Quinn for leaving me, and even more for dying. But it is impossible to hate our past, what we were, what we had, even the wrongness of our love. How can anybody hate all of that time? How else will we keep our hearts from going cold?
Beth Goldner, "The Number We End Up With"
 
..it’s not just one bell, but a series of cues that fall together, like a very particular chord one hears. And it might be formed of previous memories and associations. Or it might be there from birth, and we’re simply waiting–completely unwittingly–for the signal, to hear it. I don’t know. But anyway, there you are, doing what you ordinarily do, and, say, a girl comes down the street on her bicycle with her hair behind her, wearing a skirt of a certain color, and there’s the whir of the bicycle and maybe the sun at a certain angle to her and the smell of lilies and there you go. You would pretty much follow that girl to the ends of the earth, that particular one, for no particularly apparent reason. . . You can thwart it, but oh the misery involved–madness, tears, murder, war. Years of pining and second-guessing and melancholy.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"
 
I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don’t understand how I’m going to get from here to there.
Jody Picoult, "The Pact"

The simple fact of the matter is that a man who wakes alone will think of having a woman just as surely as a man who wakes with a wife will think of having breakfast.
Philip Kerr, "Berlin Noir"

When philosophers imagine Utopian societies, they rarely envisage melting pots of difference; rather these societies are based around like-mindedness and unity, similarity and homogeneity, a set of common goals and assumptions. It was precisely this congruence that made life with Chloe so attractive, the fact that after endless irreconcilable differences in matters of the heart, I had at last found someone whose jokes I understood without the need of a dictionary, whose views seemed miraculously close to mine, whose loves and hates kept tandem with my own and with whom I repeatedly found myself saying, "It’s amazing, I was about to say/think/do/tell you the same thing . . ."
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

Had I had any doubts, in the intervening hours since I had last seen her, about the reality of the thrall in which this woman held me, such uncertainty vanished in her presence. Though she must have moved, to open the door and so forth, there was again such a quality of stillness that one felt recklessly drawn to her as one who traverses a cliff occasionally feels perilously like throwing

oneself over the edge.
Anita Shreve, "All He Ever Wanted"
 
Oddly enough, the very considerations that had made marriage impossible for him were mirrored in my own being: a rabidly independent nature, an impatience with lesser minds, total unconventionality, and the horror of being saddled with someone who would need cosseting and protection. . . Perhaps, though, the resemblance was not odd. Holmes was a part of me. Because of our age when we met, neither of us had erected our normal defences, and by the time I came to womanhood, it was too late. He had already let me in under his guard, and I him. Holmes was a part of me, and to imagine myself "in love" with him was to imagine it is it not a part of Judaism to practice bodily mortification, to deny God’s gift of a physical body. One accepts and appreciates this act of creation; one loves one’s body, clumsy, inconvenient, and untidy as it may be. It was in this sense that I could love Holmes: Irritating as he could be, he was a part of me, and yes, I loved him.
Laurie King, "A Monstrous Regiment of Women"

Until one is actually dead [and then it must be considered impossible], it is difficult to consider anyone as the love of one’s life. But only shortly after meeting her, it seemed in no way out of place to think of Chloe in such terms. I cannot with any assurance say why, out of all the available emotions and all their possible recipients, it should suddenly have been love I felt for her. I cannot claim to know the inner dynamics of this process, nor validate these words with anything other than the authority of lived experience. . . we found ourselves calling one another every day–sometimes as many as five times a day–not to say anything in particular, simply because both of us felt that we had never spoken like this to anyone before, that all the rest had been compromise and self-deception, that only now were we finally able to understand and make ourselves understood–that the waiting [messianic in nature] was truly over. I recognized in her the woman I had been clumsily seeking all my life, a being whose qualities had been foreshadowed in my dreams, whose smile and whose eyes, whose sense of humor and whose taste in books, whose anxieties and whose intelligence perfectly matched those of my ideal.
Alain de Botton, "on Love"