#bookful

In everyday life, we seldom fully focus on conjunctions like these, any more than we focus on the word “and.” Yet multiple simultaneous experiences and emotions are so common that by the time we reach adulthood, the very fabric of our life is made of patchwork. We know by then that the world is full of beauty and grandeur and also wretchedness and suffering; we know that people are kind and funny and brilliant and brave and also petty and irritating and horrifically cruel. In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, “Life is and.” He meant that we do not live, for the most part, in a world of either/or. We live with both at once, with many things at once—everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.

"There is no honor in feeling awful and no betrayal in feeling better, and no matter how dark and salted and bitter cold your grief may be, it will never preserve anything about the person you mourn. Despite how it sometimes feels, it has never kept anyone alive, not even in memory. If anything, it keeps them dead: eventually, if you cannot stop mourning, the person you love will come to be made only of grief."

Bookful, an AR Book App

Peter Rabbit brought to life in augmented reality app

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle. You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sing, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken. Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again. Whenever it rains you think of her.