OF A GOLDEN AGE

nicole krauss’s the history of love is a beautiful book and i love this passage in particular. the context is a fifteen-year-old girl, whose father died when she was young and who keeps a record of just about everything:

“18. MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species namned after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

“My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”

people my age are often surprised to hear that “delbert” is a first name more often than a last name, though today both are fairly rare.

anyway, out of curiosity, i searched on wikipedia. as you can see, it is indeed a first name.

from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark:

“Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were only the squares on the other two sides.”

about a half hour ago, i handed in a paper on race relations between blacks and jews. it was a fascinating topic to research and this passage from james baldwin in particular is staggering. actually, the whole essay it comes from is amazing. i was reading it and actually exclaiming aloud at things he was saying.

“Of course, it is true, and I am not so naive as not to know it, that many Jews despise Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers do. It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of six million by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots — or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew.

“One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.”

cynthia ozick in another essay refers to a black reaction to Jewish sympathy as a perception of “greenhorn uppityness,” another really fascinating phrase, but one which baldwin seems to have explained pretty well in that passage.

for steve we are reading the years and it is a glorious, substantial book.

“When, she wanted to ask him, when will this New World come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave? He seemed to have released something in her; she felt not only a new space of time, but new powers, something unknown within her. [ . . . ] We shall be free, we shall be free, Eleanor thought.”

“But what do I mean, he wondered — I, to whom ceremonies are suspect, and religion’s dead; who don’t fit, as the man said, don’t fit in anywhere? He paused. There was a glass in his hand; in his mind a sentence. And he wanted to make other sentences. But how can I, he thought — he looked at Eleanor, who sat with a silk handkerchief in her hands — unless I know what’s solid, what’s true; in my life, in other people’s lives?”