I read a story and just can’t stop thinking about it for days. (This is continued from the yesterday’s post. Blogging is kinda upside-down that way.) Rose is waiting for her lover, but he never shows up.
‘The most mortifying thing of all was simply hope, which burrows so decietfully at first, masks itself cunningly, but not for long. In a week’s time it can be out trilling and twittering and singing songs at heaven’s gate. And it was busy even now, telling her that Simon might be turning into her driveway at this very moment.
And how she finally broke the spell:
‘She thought how love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it’s going well as when it’s going badly. This shouldn’t have been, and wasn’t a surprise to her; the surprise was that she so much wanted, required, everything to be there for her, thick and plain as ice-cream dishes, so that it seemed to her it might not be the disappointment, the losses, the dissolution, she had been running from, any more than the opposite of those things: the celebration and shock of love, the dazzling alteration. Even if that was safe, she couldn’t accept it. Either way you were robbed of something – a private balance spring, a little dry kernel of probity. So she thought.
May 1st, 2006
by Nannie
mortifying hope. “love removes the world from you”, I’d like that.
May 2nd, 2006
by Bob
The Author
Love is wonderful and sweet. It’s just when the obsessiveness and possessiveness come in that it turns rancid. Me, I’d rather keep my “private balance spring” and “kernel of probity”.
May 6th, 2006
by Nannie
You’d lose your kernel of “complete and confirmed integrity?” Yes, you would. Love is wonderful and sweet, and out
of our hands.
May 10th, 2006
by Left Over
Mortifying hope preceeds the dissappointments that remind her of her insignificance