thank you notes 7/26
i'm thankful that 29 years ago today, d was born. i'm thankful that one time when she was home with her family a few years ago, she used her camera to record the screen as she and her family watched their favorite home videos. i'm thankful for the palimpsest that was created, where i got to watch her with her family in the 90s as she and her family in the present day offered commentary. i'm thankful for my favorite video of her as a child, which is of her standing in front of a bookcase and reciting from memory a poem called "my books and i," which begins, "my books and i / the whole day through / have many, many things to do." i'm thankful to imagine that maybe at some point in our childhoods we were, across the country from each other, reading the same book at the same time.
i'm thankful for this passage from contact about love that i read last night:
i'm thankful for this passage from contact about love that i read last night:
"They had as discreetly as possible, been staying together, more or less, in her small apartment at Argus. Their conversations were a joy, with ideas flying back and forth like shuttlecocks. Sometimes they responded to each other's uncompleted thoughts with almost perfect foreknowledge. He was a considerate and inventive lover. And anyway, she liked his pheromones.
She was sometimes amazed at what she was able to do and say in his presence, because of their love. She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self-esteem. She liked herself better because of him. And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship. At least, that was how she described it to herself. In the presence of so many of her friends, she had felt an undercurrent of loneliness. With Ken, it was gone.
She was comfortable describing to him her reveries, snatches of memories, childhood embarrassments. And he was not merely interested but fascinated. He would question her for hours about her childhood. His questions were always direct, sometimes probing, but without exception gentle. She began to understand why lovers baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness."
i'm thankful for this passage from paris trance:
"Inside, the mosque was crowded, smoky, secular. Luke was ecstatic to be sitting down, free at last from museum-traipsing and pedal-pushing.
'Sitting in the mosque, drinking mint tea, eating delicious harissa, already looking forward to ordering another tea: that's what I'm doing now,' he said. 'That and watching the most gorgeous woman in the world eat her baklava.' Specifically, he was watching the bones in her jaw move as she chewed. There was a flake of pastry on her lip which she wiped away with a napkin. Luke did not want to tell her he loved her: they were words which, once spoken, could never again contain the feeling they had once conveyed. But the longing to tell her he loved her as overwhelming. He looked at her and said to himself, as powerfully as he could: I love you, I love you."
and this one:
"'What makes me happy?' [she said]
'Yes' [he said]. She put the bottle back and shut the fridge. Luke watched her cross the room and lie down again in the hot puddle of sun.
'Knowing you. Knowing, not looking. You see the distinction?'
'It is, so to speak, staring me in the face.'
'I know you so well, Luke. I like that. That makes me happy. Suppose they cloned you, made another one of you, absolutely identical. I could draw up a list of a hundred or a thousand things that distinguished you from it.'
Is this what it means to love someone? To take pleasure in itemising the smallest things about them? Except the list is never definitive, never complete. Things have to be added to it constantly: things that have never been noticed before, new things that turn out to be essential things."
i'm thankful for the way that books give voice and shape and name to feelings that move through our bodies like waves. i'm thankful when we read the same words and so share the things they contain. i'm thankful that 29 years ago today, d was born.
i'm thankful for the way that books give voice and shape and name to feelings that move through our bodies like waves. i'm thankful when we read the same words and so share the things they contain. i'm thankful that 29 years ago today, d was born.
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