quotations and poetry

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

– Ellen Bass

I found this beautiful poem on Light and Pine, a blog I read religiously.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed? … Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaning, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?

– Annie Dillard

One of the greatest gifts of writing memoir is having a way to shape that chaos, looking at all the pieces side by side so they make more sense. It’s a supreme act of control to understand a life as a story that resonates with others. It’s not a diary. It’s taking this chaos and making a story out of it, attempting to make art out of it. When you’re a writer, what else is there to do?

– Dani Shapiro from Why We Write About Ourselves, ed. by Meredith Maran

“We don’t need great writing to tell us that obviously amazing things are amazing, just as we don’t need high-powered telescopes to tell us that the sun is warm. What we need from great writing, most urgently, is an understanding that the mundane itself—snails, fireplaces, shrubs, pebbles, socks, minor witticisms—is secretly amazing.”

– Annie Dillard

I’m reading The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New right now (WOW) and found this beautiful, perfect passage on Calm Things.  A Dillard day.  As they all are, really.

So why don’t I remember more of the fun we must have had during her stay?… I need to say that there was delight when that visit has concentrated into two memories.  I don’t want to define that visit by only two memories. There is always more, isn’t there?  There is the life the cup can’t possibly hold without spilling.

-Paul Lisicky, The Narrow Door