somewhere between the locusts and the honey

Suppose there is an end to our suffering. Like a chariot, the absence of grief circles us with the obstinate heat of the largest star. To believe in the radiant orbit of this fire. To face an empty cup and find the constellated mire of you and me and the toppling of a century. We rise from the painful corridors of a life.

Occasionally I think of death. I can easily believe in the disintegration of the body, but cannot believe that all I have learned, experienced, accumulated, can disappear and be wasted. Like a river, it must flow somewhere. There must be continuity.

greuze:

“Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgment. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real mirror […] She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others and in particular how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”