GRECIAN URN

It occurs to me that there are six stages of book-reading: The first is picture books, then 2) books with more illustrations than words, then 3) books with more words than illustrations, then 4) books with no illustrations, just a map maybe, or a family tree, but lots of dialogue, then 5) books with long paragraphs and hardly any dialogue, then 6) books with no dialogue, no narrative, just great long paragraphs and footnotes and bibliographies and appendixes and very, very small writing. Intellectually speaking, I’m still stuck somewhere between ages four and and five.

My dearest Rachel, I don’t know how anyone has ever managed to write this kind of letter - anyone who does is a coward and a shit and used it dishonestly, so I can only minimise all three of these by being as candid as possible. I got a feeling some weeks ago that what I felt for you was changing. I wasn’t sure what the feeling was, but it wouldn’t go away and it wouldn’t change into anything else. I don’t know how or why it happens; I know that it’s the saddest thing in the world when it does. But it is I who have changed, not you. So let me hot you feel (as I do) that it has been worth it, and let me beg your forgiveness. You are the most important thing that has ever happened to me. C.

You never see them coming. They lurk in the overlooked and undusted places. They grow to huge proportions, and all along you don’t even dream about them, not in their true form. And then one day a chance meeting happens, a glimpse of that you didn’t know you wanted, and a latch is raised.

I thought you weren’t talking to me / what if I will never love / never want / never desire / I think I might not be a very /

I wished it had turned out differently. I wished I had been better all around. I wished above all that when I believed something, like that I was finally over her, that I knew myself even the slightest bit.

What you are looking for. You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever.

It is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.

Nostalgia for lost love is cowardice disguised as poetry

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

At night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the carat act of everything being and being torn away. Then, the Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.