Death
The whole earth is mortal. Even the sky, the domain of hope and the rainbow, of the clouds of doubt, of thunder and lightning, the place where the sun lives in our experience, has to die. To be is to pass.
We seek immortality by trying to imagine death.
The fact of our own mortality is a fundamental impulse to fiction.
Some of the dead live on in our minds and some of the living are already dead to us.
We die alone if we refuse ourselves the solace of our own company in the theater of memory, to which we can summon all those we have loved.
The fields we cultivate are our final resting places.
That birth causes death is the solution to the riddle of the primordial crime. Mystery novels attract us as caprices to distract us from the fundamental fact that birth, the criminal that causes death, can never be brought to justice.
Death is the river that has no other bank.
A very intuitive small child can use a parent’s ongoing inaccessibility to sketch the world’s indifference in a way that makes that child’s death real within the child.
Death walks with us and talks with us every step we take along the paths of our lives.
Death is not only cruel but also merciful. Death can surprise us by being delicate, even soft as a feather.
It is psychologically impossible to exclude from our imaginations the notion of death as a rejoining of those whom we have lost.
Death is always in the family.
When someone we love dies, just as a part of that person lives on in us, so a part of us dies along with that person. This is especially true if the one who dies is our parent, spouse, or child. If we can acknowledge the real death that has occurred within us as well as our loss of the other, then we are much freer to mourn and to go on living.
Difference
There is no respect for difference without a respect for difficulty.
We can find ourselves suddenly strange to ourselves as we wake from spells we had no suspicion held us in their thrall. We can live for decades within the frame of illusions others imposed on us. When we wake, those who thought they knew us may find us strange, too. They may think us not quite ourselves, when in fact we are more ourselves than we have ever been, but new and clumsy, since we have been so long at such a remove from ourselves. Yet, with the waking comes a feeling of freshness and awe, mingled with deep regret for lost time. How awkward it is to try to understand what that was authentic of ourselves was served by our acquiescence, our availability for thralldom. These matters are rarely spoken of because they are so delicate and embarrassing.
Our most sublime values, justice, mercy, devotion, depend on a solid foundation of disappointment to support them. Without the personal experience of disappointment both in ourselves and in the world around us we have no way of knowing what a difference values like justice, mercy and devotion can make.
Travel
The apparent ease of transportation tempts us to substitute travel, a stereotyped searching for the exotic, for imagination.
It is a paradox of travel that people seek their ease through what is inherently unsettling.
We never arrive anywhere all at once, but rather are followed by a vapor trail of imaginings, memories and forebodings that we must gradually situate in these new surroundings.
Travel shares with illness the capacity to make plain the power of the physical
Adolescence
The embarrassment of adolescence announces the beginning presence of a self, a quirky deviation from all that went before.
Adolescents get new minds and hearts
Feeling
There is a Promethean dimension to helping others learn to feel. Both fire and feeling bring with them a new sense of ardor and chaos, new protection and new danger. Unless we have a sense of the tragedy of feeling, our zeal for it is bound to have a cruel edge.
Part of the terror of authentic feeling is that it gives the self at once a sovereign center and an immediate intuition of vulnerability.
The right to bare feelings is a more fundamental constitutional liberty than the right to bear arms.
Nothing is less logical than acting as if we did not feel.
The contagion of feeling is one of the most fundamental and underappreciated facts of social life. We find so much of ourselves by catching others’ states of being.