reading when i can

Why does no one teach us what to do with the deaths of others? Why does no one teach us how to die, how we should die?

Sometimes I think pain—physical pain in particular—is sent to ease our separation with the world. To prevent us thinking about the most fearsome thing in those frightful hours.

You always imagine that in the final days of life you will utter the wisest words, you will leave your legacy, you will talk about the very essence of things… But the pain sweeps away everything.

What do we talk about when we talk about death? About life, of course, about its whole enchanting ephemerality.

What do we talk about when we talk about death? Are we talking about the person who is absent, or about ourselves? Or are we talking about absence itself?

From war and love, you return even more ignorant than when you first set out.

Because dignity, if not inherited, can be contagious.

When there’s no hope left, we turn objects into art— a sermon we leave behind for the generations to come.

Summer draws near. With it, a yearning for life even though you’re still alive.

War’s never satisfied with flesh.

The stomach functions much like the brain: / when it has nothing to think about, it feeds off memories.

It is said that the most ordinary among us is a written book that exists in heaven, a book so huge that human eyes cannot read it. That’s where everything is record—what we’ve done, said, thought, felt, even what hasn’t happened yet. Who could imagine that a human body—some square centimetres that were once only a cell— could contain so much space for history?

The body is slow, clumsy; it rarely surprises you. It takes you to places your imagination has explored long in advance.

It was terribly noisy. Impossible to follow a conversation. So I only followed the timbre of his voice, the deep, mature, inner timbre congested with calcium, like drops of water falling from cave ceilings to the ground, from earth to earth the shortest journey for sound but the longest for us mortals.

So one day, you find yourself exhibited in two separate museums at once.

Or the musical chairs game called ‘love’, where there are less empty seats than people. If you don’t want to be the last one standing you must predict when the music will stop. (Who, though, has really succeeded?)