Tuesday, February 1

boohoohoo

I have not shed so many tears while reading before. The Time Traveler's Wife got me all teary on the very first page:

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel you own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

~ Derek Walcott


There I was, alone in a cafe that was empty except for a gaggle of high-pitched Japanese housewives, and ridiculously wiping my eyes with a paper serviette. I had to stop after a few pages.

Later, blubbering discreetly on the bus:

Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,-- just what is wholly
unsayable.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke


The next day, while waiting in a quiet nook in a noisy Japanese restaurant, I'm reading again. It's a thick dictionary-sized novel. And for no reason, I'm all choked up and near tears.

Much later, in the still of the night:

Angel!: If there were a place that we didn't know of, and there,
on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
what they could never bring to mastery here -- the bold
exploits of their high-flying hearts,
their towers of pleasure, their ladders
that have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning
just on each other, trembling -- and could master all this,
before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:
would there, then, thrown down their final, forever saved-up,
forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
coins of happiness before the at last
genuinely smiling pair on the gratified
carpet?

~ Rilke


And C was right. The moment I finished sobbing through the story of the wife of a man who travels through time -- it sounds like sci fi mumbo jumbo, but it's more about fate, deja vu, love, longing and waiting -- I wanted to read it all over again. In private this time, so I can bawl without embarrassment.

But my eyes were too swollen to continue, so I went to sleep instead.

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