secretspace

The transience of passion…and pain

She wondered if passion, like pain, was something that could not be truly remembered, that one could only remember that one had felt the pain but could not remember the pain itself.

Peter Carey – Illywhacker

Men feel too

He turned his key in the lock and lay face down on his cot, shaken by the hoarse, terrible moans, which men weep for love.

Isabel Allende – The House of Spirits

On separation

They continue to caress each other without desire, torturing themselves with pleas and memories.  They were savouring the bitterness of a parting that they could already sense but could still confuse with a reconciliation.

Isabel Allende – The House of Spirits

Histories

Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruits. Tell your stories, and your story.

Tobias Wolff

Peace and happiness:

“The way to peace and happiness is peace and happiness”

Lama Surya Das – ‘Awakening the Buddha Within’

Finding home:

I felt that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being, for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me.

John Banville – ‘The Sea’

Consciousness and forgiveness:

The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed.  Perhaps this is the final forgiveness…

Consciousness and theatre:

The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.  It is a factitious present because it lacks the free aura of personal reflection and contains its own secret limits and conclusions.

Iris Murdoch – ‘The Sea, The Sea’

Leaving:

Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they’ve known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formailities that makes you feel a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult?

The answer is the same the world over. People move in the hope of a better life.

Yann Martel – ‘Life of Pi’

Really knowing someone:

“This is what you feel, looking at the hushed and vulnerable body, almost anyone’s, or you lie next to your lover after you’ve made love and breathe the heat of his merciless dreams and wonder who he is, tenderly ponder the truth you’ll never know, because this is the secret that sleep protects in its neural depths, in its stages, layers and folds.”

Really loving someone:

“You don’t know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give and take.”

The march of time:

“Time folds into the seams of being. It passes through you, making and shaping.”

Don De Lillo, ‘The Body Artist’

Knowing:

The more you know, the less you understand.

Tao Te Ching