Real need is one thing, but choosing frailty is another, and Sunny herself has seen real frailty, unchosen, and as a result she would do anything to comfort real physical pain, except cultivate and indulge it. Maybe this is what’s wrong: some are here only to have their pain—or their discomfort—cultivated and indulged.
Maile Chapman, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto.
The actress’s name means nothing to her, but the old guy seems utterly changed by saying it aloud, as if he hadn’t said the name in years. Something about the name affects her, too—a crush of romantic recognition, those words, moment and forever—as if she can feel fifty years of longing in that one name, fifty years of an ache that lies dormant in her, too, maybe lies doorman in everyone until it’s cracked open like this—and so weighted is this moment she has to look to the ground or else feel the tears burn her own eyes, and at that moment Claire glances at Shane, and sees that he must feel it, too, the name hanging in the air for just a moment … among the three of them … and then floating to the floor like a falling leaf, the Italian watching it settle, Claire guessing, hoping, praying the old Italian will say the name again, more quietly this time—to underline its importance, the way it’s so often done in scripts—but he doesn’t do this. He just stares at the floor, where the name has fallen, and it occurs to Claire Silver that she’s seen too goddamn many movies.
Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
[Y]ou must tell ’em dat love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.
Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
It was next day by the sun and the clock when they reached Palm Beach. It was years later by their bodies.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.
Then Joe Starks realized all the meanings and his vanity bled like a flood. Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible. The thing that Saul’s daughter had done to David. But Janie had done worse, she had cast down his empty armor before men and they had laughed, would keep on laughing.
Today there were two messages from writers, both carrying similar messages: “I don’t have long and so I’m prioritizing.” For Iain Banks, it was a cancer diagnosis which gives him just months to live. For Roger Ebert, who has been living with cancer for years, it was a further revelation that a “painful fracture” was, in fact further cancer. While he doesn’t say so explicitly, Ebert too is facing the reality of his own mortality in his decisions.
For Banks, imminent demise means that he’s no longer writing. His focus will instead be on enjoying as much time as possible with his loved ones as possible.
Ebert, on the other hand, is planning to continue writing reviews, albeit at a reduced pace, choosing to only review the movies that he wants to review. But at the same time, in his “Leave of Presence,” he will be pursuing some other endeavors, including an enhanced concentration on his Ebert digital.
I can’t help wondering what I would do under the same circumstances for me. Would I give up my writing entirely, or redouble my efforts? Or perhaps not change a thing.
Update: And one day later, Roger Ebert has passed away.
Line breaks willfully remind us of the wordlessness that surrounds and shapes the verbal passage; one could even say (if one wished to sabotage a fashionable critical locution) that in poetry the margin isn’t marginalized.
She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop. Man attempting to climb to painless heights from the dung hill.