The shit I underline in books.

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly then deeply for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock - the young in one another's arms, birds in the trees, those dying generations had their song.

After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched.

I sat in the cafe thinking about real time: is it time uninterrupted? Is only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains - no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by passing posters of repeating images, catching the fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time I reason cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. I looked out into the street and noticed the light changing. Perhaps the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Perhaps time had slipped away.

now there is only my mind, cautious and wary, with the sense it is being tested. Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer; bounty, balm after violence. Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields have been harvested and turned. Tell me this is the future. I won't believe you.

Grief can lead people to dark places from which they never return. I've seen that often. People constricting around an absence, growing hard and mad and furious at the world, and never recovering. There's nothing to lead them from the abyss. And beyond that I think the point blank rejection of all spiritual matters as mere nonsense has its own problems. I'm talking about the outright rejection of religion by some who basically see it as some kind of inherent evil. That stance becomes a denial of all the potential good religion brings. The comfort, the redemption, the community. This thinking can bring its own kind of nothingness. As we are seeing, people find a version of religion elsewhere - in tribalism, in identity, in politics for god's sake, or in possessions. Look at our glorious secular world as it stands today. To me, secularism can also feel like a kind of hardening around an absence. So essentially the idea I'm trying to present is that of grief as a gift. A positive force. Grief that can become its full expression: a defiant, sometimes mutinous energy.

The intonations of the presence of those who have passed away are more than just wishful thinking. This is beyond reason. I don't know about you, but for me there is forever a struggle between the rational side of my self and the side that is alert to the glimpses or impressions of something otherworldly. And of course I know there is no coherent argument to be had here. My rational self has all the weaponry, all the big guns. It has reason, science, common sense, and normality, and all the other has is suspicions, hints, and signs of something else, something mysterious and quietly spoken. But even still, it feels under the circumstances, that to dismiss these things that live beyond our reasonable selves outright is at best ungenerous.

"He suggested I go see someone who practices somatic healing [...]. It's like a therapy that focusses on trauma being stored in the body, something like that. It sounded a little LA to me but I'm willing to give anything a go [...]. She told me to focus on my sensation of anger. And as I said it, suddenly this rush of rage went through my body. It was incredibly strong, my whole body vibrating with a terrible fury. It was insane. And she goes, "there you go," and I'm crying, fucking shaking, and roaring with anger. It was really quite something." "That sounds primal. Did it help?" "I don't know." [...] "So did you go back for another session?" "Oh fuck no"

My life is lived with a different intensity. Not the intensity of youth, but something else, some kind of spiritual audacity. I've noticed this in a lot of grieving people by the way - a kind of zeal, a kind of audacity in the face of things, a kind of reckless refusal to submit to the condition of the world.

You either go under or it changes you, or worse, you become a small hard thing that has become contracted around an absence. Sometimes you find a grieving person constricted around the thing they have lost. They have become ossified and impossible to penetrate, while other people go the other way - they grow open and expansive. But I want to say this: this will happen to everyone at some point, the deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but it will be some type of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time [...] The thing is, when they put themselves back together, they often find they are a different person. A changed, more complete, more realized, more clearly drawn person. And I think that's what it is to live, to die in a way and be reborn.

It does at times feel like life has returned to a more orderly narrative, rather than something fractured and smashed apart. I don't take that feeling for granted, Sean. We should never underestimate the sense of being in the groove of life, of moving from one situation to another with the wind at your back. For being purposeful and valuable. Of life having some semblance of order. It's really something that feeling, made all the more profound because you know how transitory and easily broken it is. It seems to me life is mostly spent putting ourselves back together, but hopefully in new and interesting ways. For me that's what the creative process is. It is the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense.

My rational self seems less assured these days, less confident. Things happen in your life. Terrible things. Great, obliterating events where the need for spiritual consolation can be immense, and your sense of what is rational is less coherent and can suddenly find itself on very shaky ground. We are supposed to put our faith in the rational world, yet when the world stops making sense, perhaps your need for some greater meaning can override reason. And in fact it can suddenly seem the least interesting, most predictable, and least rewarding aspect of yourself. That's my experience anyway.

When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding. No emotion is more frightening than joy, because we believe if we allow ourselves to feel joy we are inviting disaster. We start dress rehearsing tragedy in the best moments of our lives in order to stop vulnerability from beating us to the punch. We are terrified of being blindsided by pain, so we practice tragedy and trauma, but there is a huge cost. When we push away joy we squander the goodness that we need to build resilience, strength, and courage.

To give birth is to stand between life and death. It is terrifying and holy. The dangers are very real. Yet it is also to be in the presence of God. So in the Jewish tradition the purification ritual after birth acknowledged the powerful experience that the woman had undergone in giving birth. It recognized that she had stood on the threshold of death and just about looked God in the face.

Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.

It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!

All together I spent more than 4 hours with the prodigal son, making notes about what I heard the guides and the tourists say about what I saw as the sun grew stronger then faded away, about what I experienced in my innermost being as I became more and more part of the story that Jesus once told and Rembrandt once painted. I wondered whether and how these precious hours in the hermitage would ever bear fruit. When I left the painting I walked up to the young guard and tried to express my gratitude for his putting up with me for so long. As I looked into his eyes I saw a man like myself: afraid, and with a great desire to be forgiven.

"She's gone insane," said Nick to Capello. "She's fallen in love with a very lab-coated skeleton who originally kidnapped her. It's stockbone syndrome."