Right In The Middle Is Where The Truth Lies

Phyl borrowed The History of Love from Claire and liked it enough to recommend it to me, and I'm more than halfway through it and I really think it's a wonderfully written novel. As the Sunday Telegraph puts it, it is "wonderfully affecting... brilliant, touching and remarkably poised." One of the surprise better reads I've had of this genre and style of writing.

I can't help but continue quoting liberally.



Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling of resentment on the one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other. It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy, a bolt of lightning that caused the first feeling of awe. Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn’t born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time had passed, and someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia.

It’s also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it — just to name it — must have been like trying to catch something invisible.

(Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.)

Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions. It’s possible that this is how art was born. New kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness. The eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.



The next afternoon, Rosa turned up for a second meeting just as she'd promised. When she glanced at her watch and realized how late it had got they planned a third meeting, and after that it went without saying that there'd be a fourth. The fifth time they met, under the spell of Rosa's youthful spontaneity - halfway through a heated discussion about who was a greater poet, Neruda or Dario - Litvinoff surprised himself by proposing they go hear a concert together. When Rosa jumped to agree, it dawned on him that, miracle of miracles, this lovely girl might actually be developing feelings for him. It was as if someone had struck a gong in his chest. His whole body reverberated with the news.



So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past: Iwasabeautifulgirl-Pleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglassI’veneverlovedanyoneI-thinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme…

There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a bundle of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for string.

The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.



"Let’s stand under a tree," she said.
"Why?"
"Because it’s nicer."
"Maybe you should sit on a chair, and I’ll stand above you, like they always do with husbands and wives."
"That’s stupid."
"Why?"
"Because we’re not married."
"Should we hold hands?"
"We can’t."
"Why not?"
"Because people will know."
"Know what?"
"About us."
"So what if they know?"
"It’s better when it’s a secret."
"Why?"

"So no one can take it from us."




Audio Candy:
I Am Ghost - The Ship Of Pills And Needed Things

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And then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you. If so, no one was a greater father than I.



The other day Angie and I were discussing about The Kite Runner and the same wave of emotion I felt after reading the parts about Baba and Amir (father and son) swept over me. Perhaps I feel for it because there's just something between my dad and I that I can't quite reconcile right now. If anything, that's the kinda dad I'd wanna be. Crudely put, it's about teaching your kid to look right, left and right, and then cross; so as not to be cumbered by the rules of traffic and depending on the safety of the green man only to a practical extent. It's about raising your kid so that he or she doesn't feel indebted to you just because you're the parent. I'll never want my kid(s) to bear that burden. I'd like my kid(s) to grow up knowing I'm not owed much, because we often can never come close to repaying the labour of our folks. It is something that we'd only do well to pay forward, leaving a legacy with the upcoming generation and hoping it goes on.




“What about me Baba? What am I supposed to do?” I said, my eyes welling up.

A look of disgust swept across his face. It was the same look he’d give me when, as a kid, I’d fall, scrape my knees, and cry. “You’re twenty-two years old, Amir! A grown man! You…” he opened his mouth and closed it, reconsidering.

“What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question.”




Audio Candy:
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The Situation Verged On Critical

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 the only 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 Giacometri 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.




"The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma," she'd say, the Spanish book open on her lap while I lay in bed. This was when I was four or five, before Dad got sick and the book was put away on a shelf. "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.

"If you remember the first time you saw Alma, you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window. Come back, Alma! you shouted. Come back! Come back!

"But She didn't.

"And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. and though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

"For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

"Of course, there are certain cases in which the boy in question refuses to stop shouting at the top of his lungs for Alma. Stages a hunger strike. Pleads. Fills a book with his love. Carries on until she has no choice but to come back. Every time she tries to leave, knowing it's what has to be done, the boy stops her, begging like a fool. And so she always returns, no matter how often she leaves or how far she goes, appearing soundlessly behind him and covering his eyes with her hands, spoiling for him anyone who could ever come after her."




Audio Candy:
Placebo - Special K