The void is my friend.
The sound of the Gion Shoja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the colour of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.
From the Heike Monogatari, translated by Helen Craig McCullough, epigraph of this book
“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked.
page 82
I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.”
She wants to say, what you’re missing is that I’ve been happy. What you’re missing is that for the first time in years I don’t feel like a disease waiting to be happy or a problem to be solved until I’m back in the now, until she and I are apart.
page 44, from the short story named Madeleine
I had a dream about uranium
I wondered what it smells like
like overripe fruit
like papaya and pomegranates
like peaches and plums
does it smell like life?
I had the thought, for the first time in months, that life without death is a miserable gift.
page 4, Sebastian