Anna Begins...

"When my mother died I felt expanded, slowly, durably over time. I felt suffused with her truth, spread through, as with water, color or light. I thought she'd entered the deepest place I could provide, the animating entity, the thing, if anything, that will survive my own last breath, and she makes me larger, she amplifies my sense of what it is to be human. She is part of me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully. It is only a statement of the power of what comes after."

“Still I can’t get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it won’t go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind.”

“The specter of desire necessarily lies. What’s presented as desirable is masked. Sooner or later the mask falls. Then anguish is unmasked, as is the annihilation of perishable existence. Truly, truly, you long for the night. But you have to take the indirect way; your way is to love friendly faces. These desirable faces proclaim the possession of pleasure, which quickly becomes possession of death. But death can’t be possessed–it’s dispossession. Which is why the scene of pleasure disappoints. To be disappointed is life’s bottom line, its core truth. Without experiencing exhaustion and disappointment you wouldn’t ever know–at the precise moment your courage fails–that insatiable craving for sex is death’s dispossession. To go looking for pleasure is far from cowardice, it’s life’s remotest edge, a raving courage. It’s a ploy used by horror in us of ever being satisfied. Naturally, love’s the most distant possibility. Again and again obstacles conceal love from the mania of love. Desire and love are confused with each other. Love’s a desire to possess an object as great as the totality of desire. Love’s insanity becomes sane when moving towards more insane love. Love makes this demand. Either its object escapes you or you escape it. If love didn’t run away from you, you’d run away from love. Lovers discover each other only in mutual laceration. Each of the two craves suffering. Desire desires in them what’s impossible. Otherwise desire would be quenched, desire would die. When lack of satisfaction begins to prevail, you should satisfy your desire. You should lose yourself in the bosom of unutterable happiness. At that point happiness is the condition for increasing your desire, and satisfaction becomes desire’s fountain of youth.”