I think this is my favorite part of Housekeeping, along with the first couple pages of Chapter 10:

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally and in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water--peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is its taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

Sylvie was gone. She had left without a word, or a sound. I thought she must be teasing, perhaps watching me from the woods. I pretended not to know I was alone. I could see why Sylvie thought children might come here. Any child who saw once how gleaming water spilled to the tips of branches, and rounded and dropped and pocked the softening shadows of frost at the foot of each tree, would come to see it again.

If there had been snow I would have made a statue, a woman to stand along the path, among the trees. The children would have come close, to look at her. Lot's wife was salt and barren, because she was full of loss and mourning, and looked back. But here rare flowers would gleam in her hair, and on her breast, and in her hands, and there would be children all around her, to love and marvel at her for her beauty, and to laugh at her extravagant adornments, as if they had set the flowers in her hair and thrown down all the flowers at her feet, and they would forgive her, eagerly and lavishly, for turning away, though she never asked to be forgiven. Though her hands were ice and did not touch them, she would be more than mother to them, she so calm, so still, and they such wild and orphan things.

quotes from favorite books #3

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

+

Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

+

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.

--The Road, McCarthy

(When I finished this book at 3am, I couldn't fall asleep because I was devastated and couldn't breathe from crying.)

favorite quotes from favorite books #2

What is the meaning of life?... a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

+

Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

+

She looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across her bed, stroking the floor), but for all that, she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

+

Beauty had this penalty -- it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life - froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognizable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after.

+

It partook . . . of eternity . . . there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

+

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

+

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

--To The Lighthouse, Woolf


(This is my favorite book in the world; I could easily quote the entire thing. I think I might use that last one as a section break in my ms.)

favorite quotes from favorite books #1

Don't cry, what else could she say, what meaning do tears have when the world has lost all meaning, In the girl's room on the chest of drawers stood the glass vase with the withered flowers, the water had evaporated, it was there that her blind hands directed themselves, her fingers brushed against the dead petals, how fragile life is when it is abandoned.

--Blindness, Saramago

P-town

Lately I'm realizing that I need a novel in my life to be truly happy. To be reading one, that is. The longer I go without reading a novel, the more depressed I become about everything: the uncertainty of adulthood, money, the health care crisis, the war, politics, etc. It's as if the beauty starts fading, or maybe drifting further away from me, the way an object tossed into the waves starts moving further and further into the ocean until you can't see it anymore. And then I start reading again and come across a passage like this one:


18. MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER

She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being only the known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head, you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.


And then I'm like, Oh yeah, right, you just needed a book. Don't forget again.

So anyway, I finished History of Love, which was sweet. Then I read Everything is Illuminated, which was so-so, difficult to finish. Now I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale, which is frightening and discomforting, and definitely the most terrifying dystopian novel I have read (much worse than 1984). I think any woman conscious of gender oppression has visualized and feared such a scenario; Atwood has simply given it breath and life and context and a whole lot of sadness.

At the used bookstore in P-town -- a cute little thing, tiny wooden shack -- I bought a Hopkins book, but also Housekeeping and Ada (Nabokov). The latter is a vintage paperback with a strangely over-the-top description on the back. The first sentence:

Ardis Hall -- the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis -- this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principle part is staged in dream-bright America -- for are not American childhood memories comparable to Vineland-bron caravellas, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams?

Hmm, I suppose so?

Anyway, I've written one poem since I've gotten here. I'm going to try to do some revising today. Mostly I've just been exploring the little town, checking out the library and the beach and the stores, and "meeting" people. The weather is gorgeous; I really missed autumn in New England. I also really missed Cabot cheese, which is much better than Tillamook.