topic/love
Leonard Cohen,
Shirley Hazzard,
Lauren Elkin,
Jeffrey Eugenides,
James Salter,
Karen Tei Yamashita,
Jonathan Franzen,
Liv Ullmann,
Lucia Berlin
the other side of heartbreak
"I've not seen you since."
It was the mingling of great and trivial that could not be misunderstood.
He went on, "Yet we are so close."
She fell silent, leaning back into colours and shadows of the room: not in fulfillment, which could hardly be, but in voluptuous calm, at peace. Her hand was outstretched on the table, the sleeve pushed up. It was the first time he had seen her inner arm. She knew it might be the only such passage between them, ever. If the usual griefs were coming to her at last, so was this unprecedented perfection.
He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"
They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."
Why doesn’t he love me anymore? The question is why did he love me in the first place. One never asks oneself. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself—exactly oneself and no one else—and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else. He loved me, that’s all. And for ever, since I should always be me. (And I have been astonished at this blindness, in other women. Strange that one can only understand one’s own case by the help of other people’s experience—experience that is not the same as mine, and that doesn’t help.)
How silly, she was thinking, to use the word ready. When can you be ready for anything? Or is life, in fact, a continuum of things you must prepare for, and only with perfect preparation can you exist in the present?
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