#marathe

Today my father said to me “Here, stand just here… up and to the right of her… yeah, now it looks like Grandma doesn’t it?” Being in a room with a dead body for 3 hours is like being in a wax museum. Except the wax museum has a wax figure of one of your relatives. And that relative is dead. And it’s a relatively shitty wax museum.

After the calling hours were over, my family (mom, dad, brother, sister-in-law, cousins, aunt, second cousins, some people I’m not sure how I’m related to) all went to a Mexican restaurant. It was actually one of the best times I’ve had with my family. Salsa and chips and emotional exhaustion worked their magic.

Favorite Lines:

Page 731 “When they laughed in delight they seemed to chew at the air.”

I think forward progress depends on a rubber band. You, as a person, move as far forward as you can, until the rubber band snaps you back to your starting point— leaving you to become attached all over again to the place you’d been trying to escape. After a period of obsession, you resume the slow march forward again and this time the rubber band stretches a bit farther before snapping you back. Each time you move forward a bit more and a bit more, but each time you get snapped back and are faced with starting all over again. But eventually the rubber band weakens and it stretches so far you barely notice it. And one day, it breaks. No more snapping back and you’ll only notice it’s gone by the absence of its slight but persistent pressure. Which is noticing nothing at all.

Favorite Lines:

Page 636 “Stice is one of those athletes whose body you know is an unearned divine gift because its conjunction with his face is so incongruous. He resembles a poorly spliced photo, some superhuman cardboard persona with a hole for your human face. A beautiful sports body, lithe and tapered and sleekly muscled, smooth— like a Polycleitos body, Hermes or Theseus before his trials— on whose graceful neck sits the face of a ravaged Winston Churchill, broad and slab-featured, swart, fleshy, large-pored, with a mottled forehead under the crew cut’s V-shaped hairline, and eye-pouches, and jowls that hang and whenever he moves suddenly or lithely make a sort of meaty staccato sound like a wet dog shaking itself dry.”

This is my last day of the pilgrimage home; I fly back tomorrow. I saw my best friend from high school today. She has a 3-year-old and lives with her mother. I found out that almost everyone from my high school who stayed in my home town is on heroin.  This is actually a severe exaggeration. I found out that two of my friends’ younger brothers have been in and out of jail because of heroin and I found out my best friend had to go to rehab for cocaine and almost lost her daughter to child services. And yet my mother pressures me to move back. She broke out the real estate listings today.

Favorite Lines:

Page 503 “It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with on hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation.”

It’s so interesting to me that one brain can hold the concept of “I’m not being treated well by that person” alongside the blindingly intense desire of “I want to be with that person.” I suppose the key word in the sentence is “blindingly.”

Favorite Lines:

Page 319 “This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose— this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. What you call the death, the collapsing: this will be the formality only.”

Page 319 “But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, the choosing.”

Page 320 “But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to. How for the person to freely choose?”