Highlights
When we take as true the premise that if something is lost, something else is gained, given that I lost you, what have I gained? What will I now gain through the loss of the visible world?
- Page 38
Why had I been such a fool when it came to loving you? My love for you wasn’t foolish, but I was; had my own innate foolishness made love itself foolish? Or is it that I myself wasn’t all that foolish, but love’s inherent foolishness awakened any foolishness latent in me and eventually smashed everything to pieces?
- Page 38
In fact, those nights were filled with a sweetness I know I will never experience again. It was around then that I realized for the first time that falling in love is like being haunted. Even before I opened my eyes in the morning, you would slip in under my eyelids. When I opened them, you instantly transferred to the ceiling, the wardrobe, the windowpane, the street, the far- off sky, and glimmered there like dappled light. You haunted me more persistently than I imagine any ghost ever could. In the small mirror by the desk that summer night, what was reflected was the upper half of my body as I sweated through my clumsy gestures and signs and facial expressions, but I recognized the glow of your face shimmering over mine at every moment. You speak to me.
- Page 39
She walks in order to exhaust herself to the point of no longer being able to walk. She walks until she is unable to register the quiet of the house to which she must now return, until she has no strength left to cast her gaze over the black woods, the black curtains, the black sofa, the black Lego boxes. She walks until, giddy with tiredness, she will be able to lie down on her side on the sofa and fall asleep without washing or tugging a quilt over herself. She walks so that she will not wake in the middle of the night even if plagued by nightmares, so that she will not toss and turn with her eyes open until dawn, unable to achieve sleep again. She walks so that, in those vivid dawn hours, she will not have to doggedly recall and piece together the broken shards of memories.
- Page 82
“In the part that argues everything has within it that which harms it, he uses the example of how the inflammation of the eye ruins the eye and blinds it, and how rust ruins iron and completely shatters it. Why, then, isn’t the human soul, which is analogous to such things, ruined by its foolish, bad attributes?”
- Page 97
“You know how they say that, to the Ancient Greeks, virtue wasn’t goodness or nobility, but the ability to do a certain thing in the very best way— arete was their word, the capacity for excellence. Well, think about it. Who would be best able to think about life? Someone who faces death at every turn, someone who, for that reason, is inevitably thinking of death, always, necessarily, urgently… and wouldn’t that effectively mean someone like me possesses the finest arete, at least for contemplation?”
- Page 104
During those long hours that I spent with you, the words I actually, desperately wanted to say, more than any other question and answer, more than any quote or allusion or argument, may have been these: That when the most frail, tender, forlorn parts of us, that is to say our life- breaths, are at some point returned to the world of matter, we will receive nothing in recompense. That when the time comes for me, I don’t see myself remembering the full range of the experiences I’d accumulated up to that point only in terms of beauty. That it is in this tired, worn context that I understand Plato. That he himself knew that such beauty does not exist. And that there is no complete thing, ever. At least in this world.
- Page 111
You said to me, No one can understand me unless they also grew up within the benzene smell of hospital wards. You said, Beauty is only that which is intense, has a vibrant energy. You said, This thing we call life mustn’t ever become something endured. You said, Dreaming of another world than this is a sin. And so to you, beauty was the thronging streets. The tram that stops brimming with simmering sunshine. The furiously racing heart, the swelling lungs, the still- warm lips, and the fervent rubbing of those lips against another’s.
- Page 113
I couldn’t sleep for longing to see the you who was not you. I yearned like madness only for the you who was not you.
- Page 115