sibling relationships are so strange… like i love you. you will never understand me in a way that matters. we are the same person in drastically different ways. we are sewn together. we don’t talk. we are attached at the hip. you wish i was never born. can i call you. let’s eat together. i forgive you. etc
i don’t have enough photos of you on my phone to make one your contact picture. we got the same tattoo completely by coincidence. why do you always get to be mario. i love the meals you cook. we live in different universes. you can stay at my house if you need. we have never been friends. you are more important to me than anyone on this earth
“Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. I looked on the shelves over there and couldn’t find it – is it perhaps in another section? Russian Literature or something? The librarian consulted a computer. We both waited. The wait was friendly, full of the special time that wanders in municipal libraries, like a solitary walker between trees in a wood. She lifts her head and says: We have two copies and I’m afraid they’re both out. You want to reserve one? I’ll come back another day. She nods and turns to attend to an elderly woman – younger than me – who is holding three books in one hand. People hold books in a special way – like they hold nothing else. They hold them not like inanimate things but like ones that have gone to sleep. Children often carry toys in the same manner. The public library is in a Paris suburb which has a population of around 60,000. About 4,000 people are members of the library and have tickets for borrowing books (four at a time). Others come to read the papers and journals or consult the reference shelves. If one takes into account the number of babies and young kids in the suburb, this means that about one person in ten has a ticket and sometimes takes home books to read. I wonder who’s reading The Brothers Karamazov here today. Do the two of them know each other? Unlikely. Are they both reading the book for the first time? Or has one of them read it and, like myself, wants to reread it? Then I find myself asking an odd question: if either of those readers and myself passed one another – in the suburban market on Sunday, coming out of the metro, on a pedestrian crossing, buying bread – might we perhaps exchange glances that we’d both find slightly puzzling? Might we, without recognising it, recognise one another? When we are impressed and moved by a story, it engenders something that becomes, or may become, an essential part of us, and this part, whether it be small or extensive, is, as it were, the story’s descendant or offspring. What I’m trying to define is more idiosyncratic and personal than a mere cultural inheritance; it is as if the bloodstream of the read story joins the bloodstream of one’s life story. It contributes to our becoming what we become and will continue to become. Without any of the complications and conflicts of family ties, these stories that shape us are our coincidental, as distinct from biological, ancestors. Somebody in this Paris suburb, perhaps sitting tonight in a chair and reading The Brothers Karamazov, may already, in this sense, be a distant, distant cousin.”
“Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to another human being is detachment. Attachment, even that which imagines it is selfless, always lays some burden on the other person. How to learn to love in a light, airy way that there is no burden?”
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
“The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, ‘Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.’ For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed.”
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“ …Because I don’t KNOW what I want of you. I deliver MYSELF over to the unknown, in coming to you, I am without reserves or defences, stripped entirely, into the unknown. Only there needs the pledge between us, that we will both cast off everything, cast off ourselves even, and cease to be, so that that which is perfectly ourselves can take place in us.’”
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
“We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean, we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us, as well, in our distance. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or articles), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation.”
I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it.
ALT