The shit I underline in books.

He once saw a TV special of a sperm whale dissection, Mitt calling out the highlights. The scientist pulled back seven inches of blubber to reveal a hidden echo location organ called the monkey's muscle, which looked exactly like the lips of a monkey. Jay suspected the whale's collected spirits go beyond only animals it consumes. Maybe he'll dig around down here, see what else he finds. Elephant tusk, rabbit ear, turkey feather, salamander tail, ostrich leg, butterfly wing. That's the baptism, initiation into a ghost menagerie, extinction, cancelled, now a kind of peace. [...] the peace carmelite nuns find in skinning God from sun, from holy spirit. The peace parishioners feel after consuming the body and blood of Christ. What always felt brutal to Jay about the natural world now feels like its most elegant design. We all eat each other, like Hewey said. That's why we live forever.

He checks his glow in the dark console, dim through the murk: 72 feet, 2768 PSI. A tenth of a cylinder already empty. Can a man really vanish down here, bones and all, when before that man was the whole day, the mountains, everything?

Over decades she had reclaimed what she had forfeited of her own mind, if any. She took pains to keep outside the world's acceleration. [...] She had long since cut out fashion, and any radio but the Red Socks. In the past few years she had let go of her ties to people she did not like. To ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored what did not interest her. With those blows, she opened her days like a piñata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her, the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.

She wanted only to hear herself think. She admired Diogenes who shaved half his head so he would stay home to think. How else might she hear any original note, any stray subject and verb in the head, however faint should one come.

She thought she was getting too old to regard her bitterness as the natural effect of a cause outside of herself.

They walked all the way home. She longed for the life she already possessed, a life large as clouds.

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.