A Year in the Words of Others (ii)

February

"Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted–wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.
Nicole Krauss, "The History of Love"

Loving is fine if you have plenty of time
For walking on stilts at the edge of your mind
Damien Rice, "The Professor & La fille Danse"

"We have so much in common, you see. It’s like we’re sisters, and our minds are on the same wavelength. We always know what the other one is thinking and feeling. Then men I’ve been with, it was always about words–talking, explaining, arguing, yakking all the time. With us, I just have to look at her, and she’s inside my skin. I’ve never had that with anyone before. Nancy calls it a magic bond–but I just call it love, pure and simple. The real deal."
Paul Auster, "The Brooklyn Follies"
 
What I feel is only for you. You do not have my love exclusively, Madeleine, but uniquely.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, "Hotel Transylvania"
 
Most of the time, I could tell what my Jimmy was thinking. The terrain inside his wonderful head was my backyard; I felt at home there.
Dean Koontz, "Life Expectancy"

 "I never meant to fall in love with him, you know."
"Nobody ever means to do it." I noticed that my hand was on hers. "It just happens that way. Like a car accident." But looking at her elfin face I wasn’t sure if I agreed with what I was saying. Her beauty wasn’t the kind that’s left smeared on your pillowcase in the morning, but the kind that would make a man proud that his child should have such a mother.
Philip Kerr, "Berlin Noir"

I could not account for this desire; the only explanation comprehensive enough would have been to mutely point to the desired person herself [thereby echoing Montaigne’s reasons for his friendship with La Boetie. Because she was she, and I was I.]
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

La fille danse
Quand elle joue avec moi
Et je pense que je l’aime des fois
Le silence, n’ose pas dis-donc
Quand on est ensemble
Damien Rice – The Professor & La fille Danse

It is so rare that we do the right thing, and rarer still that we say it, words being dull and clumsy tools indeed. We live our lives at cross-purposes to our intentions; we injure where we would heal; we abjure and insult what we mean purely to love. The peace among us depends on equivocation, guesswork, revisionism, and reinterpretation, and brevity of memory.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"

The difficulty of a declaration goes beyond the difficulty of ordinary communication. If I had told Chloe I had a stomach ache or a red car or a garden full of daffodils, I could count on her to understand. Naturally, my image of a bedaffodiled garden may differ slightly from hers, but there would be reasonable parity between the two images. The words, crossing the divide that separated us, would have operated as reliable messengers of meaning, the letter would have reached its destination. But the card I was now trying to write had no such guarantee attached to it. The words were the most ambiguous in the language, because the thing they referred to so sorely lacked stable meaning. Certainly, travelers had returned from the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but the word was on no fixed latitude, it lacked geographical definition, it was a rare-colored butterfly never conclusively identified.
Alain de Botton, "on Love"

March

You step a little closer each day
So close that I can’t see what’s going on
Damien Rice – Cannonball

Maybe it’s our free will misdirected or just a shameful pride, but we live our lives with the conviction that we stand at the center of the drama. Moments rarely come that put us outside ourselves, that divorce us from our egos and force us to see the larger picture, to recognize that the drama is in fact a tapestry and that each of us is but a thread in the vivid weave, yet each thread essential to the integrity of the cloth.
Dean Koontz, "Life Expectancy"

How could she explain? She was here because she’d kissed a man in this very spot, and tasted happiness for the first time in her adult life. She was here because he said he’d run away with her, and she believed him–believed, for a few, brief, intensely sweet moments, that she was something special, one of the lucky ones, a character in a love story with a happy ending.
Tom Perrotta, "Little Children"

Jane is, of course, no stranger to anxiety . . . And her daily life is in essence a sandbagging operation against its sea and their tides. But this is worry, and it is a little different from anxiety: Particular rather than pervasive, it arrives unannounced, without anxiety’s harbingers, dread and foreboding, the fearful tea in which we steep awaiting oblivion. Instead, worry simply turns upon the doorstep, the overbearing, passive-aggressive out-of-town relative who insists he "won’t be any trouble" even as he displaces every known routine and custom of the house for days and weeks on end; as he expropriates the sofa, the bathroom, the contents of the liquor cabinet and cigarette carton, and monopolizes the telephone and the ear of anyone within shouting distance. Worry displaces the entire mood, the entire ethos of the house–even if that mood hitherto consisted largely of anxiety–and replaces it with something more substantive, more real than a mere mood. You would be mightily pleased to have ordinary anxiety back in residence, for under worry there is no peace whatsoever, not even the peace of cynicism, pessimism, or despair. Even when all the rest of the world is abed, worry is awake, plundering the kitchen cupboards, raiding the refrigerator, playing the hi-fi, watching the late show until the national anthem closes the broadcast day; then noisily treading the halls, standing in your bedroom door, wondering if by chance you are still up (knowing that of course you are), breathing and casting its shadow upon you, the silhouette of its slope-shouldered hulk and its towering black wings.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"

são as águas de março fechando o verão
é promessa de vida no teu coração
Damien Rice – Waters of March

 …I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.
Dean Koontz, "Brother Odd"

I certainly haven’t been shopping for any new shoes
And I certainly haven’t been spreading myself around
I still only travel by foot and by foot it’s a slow climb
But I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time
Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine

..she had tantalizingly tossed me that phrase, thereby letting bits of her dark secret, the hot one she’d clutched tightly in her hands, fall through her fingers, so that I might see it, follow it like the barest trail of sand. Not even when I was alone with her in the woods did she have the guts (Mut, in German) to let go of it, throw it all into the air so it showered over our heads, got caught in our hair and mouths.
Marisha Pessl, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"
 
Jane knows who she is (she is the beggar maid) but she is not disgraced, but graced; gifted, because with nothing left, not even her only son, she has Edward Byrne for ninety minutes at a time, as long as he will come, as long as heaven allows; and it seems to her that they are their very own heaven, that this is what they make when they make love, so it might well last forever.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"
 
All at once it strikes me that as well as I know Sonia, I know only one version of her–that all you know of a life are the places where it touches your own. Under the fluorescent lights of the waiting room I’m catching a glimpse of the places where I don’t exist. It’s strange and diminishing, like looking through a telescope at the stars.
Leah Stewart, "The Myth of You & Me"

It is bad enough that worry induces a sense of paralysis, and worse when it imposes paralysis as a duty, as the best solution to the problem from which it has arisen. The world, of course, is deeply contingent, and we are doubtless fools to believe we are ever free from its accidents or the purposes and deeds of others. But we enjoy the illusion–or the promise, for those inclined to belief–that we can act a little in our lives and the lives of our fellows, and not always for the worse. Perhaps that is why worry leads so easily to despair, to existential doubt and disbelief, for we can do nothing good under its aspect but wait, and it is a passive, virtueless kind of waiting, a kind of timorous staying out of the way, standing atop a chair while the mouse of chance runs amok round the kitchen floor.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"

April

     "I thought she was rather sad. I sent her flowers after one of our dinners, after I told her, rather harshly, what I thought of her–that she was one of those despairing people who concoct madcap theories about others–and doubtlessly for herself–purely for entertainment as their own lives are so dull. Such people wish to be bigger than they actually are. And naturally, when one speaks one’s mind–tells someone the truth, or one’s personal version of it–it never goes over well. Someone always ends up crying. Remember what I’ve always said about truth, standing in a long black dress in the corner, feet together, head down?"
    "She’s the loneliest girl in the room."
    "Precisely. Contrary to popular belief, no one wants anything to do with her. She’s too depressing to be around. Trust me, everyone prefers to dance with something a little sexier, a little more comforting."
Marisha Pessl, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

 "But," she said, and stopped. To her credit, she did not avert her eyes. "This must be said: I do not love you." There was a great silence in the room. My heart paused in its workings. I could not move or speak. It was not that I couldn’t have anticipated such a response (indeed, I’d often feared it in my imaginings); it was that hearing it aloud and spoken in such a plain way had the effect of a blow taken to the center of my body. I had so wished for this not to be true. I had thought somehow that my own love for her might have been infectious. At the very least, I had hoped that if such a sentiment were true, she might not actually voice it, and in time would develop true fondness for me.
Anita Shreve, "All He Ever Wanted"
 
We yearn for tomorrow and the progress it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.
Dean Koontz, "Brother Odd"

But that was the labyrinth which he was attempting to flee, and to examine it further–to try and parse the grammar of his and Jane’s love–only made him more lost.
Robert Clark, "Love Among the Ruins"
 
Imagine, I suggest to Paris, only knowing that the sun is shining because you feel the ache of its awful heat and not because you know the joy of its light. Imagine being always in the dark.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"
 
Dad kissed me on the cheek and walked through the hall to the front door. It was one of those instances one feels as if one’s skin has abruptly become thin as one layer of phyllo dough on a triangle of baklava, when one desperately doesn’t want the other person to go, but one doesn’t say anything in order to feel isolation in its purest form, as a periodic table of element, one of the noble gases, Iso1.
Marisha Pessl, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics"

 Dr. Sterling always tells me that it takes a lot of energy to be depressed and even more energy to get better, and the reason so many depressives choose to go to the hospital is that it’s the one place where they aren’t forced to use their energies on any other activities.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

 Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.
Anita Shreve, "All He Ever Wanted"