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5e6cd84
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Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
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place
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Anne Michaels |
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f809695
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There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
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Anne Michaels |
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268557a
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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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words
literature
reading
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Anne Michaels |
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3cf6b9b
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Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. T..
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Anne Michaels |
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3cc85a0
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Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather--storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
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trees
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Anne Michaels |
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896a364
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Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.
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Anne Michaels |
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c4ba895
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Any given moment--no matter how casual, how ordinary--is poised, full of gaping life.
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living
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Anne Michaels |
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70855e6
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When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screami..
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holocaust
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Anne Michaels |
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4a14d53
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But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.
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Anne Michaels |
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31342e7
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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Anne Michaels |
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2d25609
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when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
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pleasure
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Anne Michaels |
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b7faf57
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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Anne Michaels |
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398571a
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I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
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Anne Michaels |
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9859dfc
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Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.
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Anne Michaels |
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864e6ba
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The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light....It's a mistake to think it's the small things we control and not the large, it's the other way around! We can't stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident - or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large ..
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Anne Michaels |
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073d344
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That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one's back too often in favour of sleep. I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthful..
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world-war-2
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Anne Michaels |
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959b9fa
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When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.
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Anne Michaels |
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24be5a5
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In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge.
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Anne Michaels |
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0280b1c
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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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Anne Michaels |
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b67341e
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Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love.
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Anne Michaels |
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6b947e0
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In every childhood there is a door that closes. Only real love waits while we journey through our grief. That is the real trustworthiness between people. In all the epics, in all the stories that have lasted through many lifetimes, it is always the same truth: love must wait for wounds to heal. It is this waiting we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous. How many are willi..
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Anne Michaels |
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74a8a65
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Time is a blind guide.
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Anne Michaels |
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72320d0
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Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time
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truth-inspirational
truth-of-life
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Anne Michaels |
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db24203
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I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.
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Anne Michaels |
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2bffb03
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The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
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Anne Michaels |
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7fa6414
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Nothing erases the immoral act. Not forgiveness. Not confession. And even if the act could be forgiven, no one could bear the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. Not act of violence is ever resolved when the one who can forgive can no longer speak; there is only silence.
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Anne Michaels |
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3aebe02
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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
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Anne Michaels |
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e036a9a
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And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch - it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to another - but rather, it is everything you leave behind. At that moment. Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts - that they we..
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pain
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Anne Michaels |
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d19e11e
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The shawl's bottom edge the clearest blue, as if it has been dipped in the sea. The blue of a glance.
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Anne Michaels |
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e7e272a
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Not long after our final lesson, on one of our Sundays at the lake, my father and I were walking along the shore when he noticed a small rock shaped like a bird. When he picked it up, I saw the quick gleam of satisfaction in his face and felt in an instant that I had less power to please him than a stone.
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Anne Michaels |
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72c3876
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Write to save yourself,' Athos said, 'and someday you'll write because you've been saved.
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Anne Michaels |
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3fbaabd
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I want you to promise we'll see each other again, you'll send a letter. Promise we'll be lost together in our forest, pale birches of our legs. I hear your voice now--I know, everyone knows promises come from fear. People don't live past each other, you're always here with me. Sometimes I pretend you're in the other room until it rains... and then this is the letter I always write...
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Anne Michaels |
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9dfae00
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Last Night's Moon," "When will we next walk together under last night's moon?" - Tu Fu March aspens, mist forest. Green rain pins down the sea, early evening cyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedy toques of low tide, pillow lava's black spill indelible in the sand. Unbroken broken sea. -- Rain sharpens marsh-hair birth-green of the spring firs. In the bog where the dead never disappear, where river birch drown, the surface strewn with refle..
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Anne Michaels |
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306eb95
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History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
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memory
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Anne Michaels |
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6d18ab7
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When I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.
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Anne Michaels |
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e2eeace
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Does it matter if they were from Kielce or Brno or Grodno or Brody or Lvov or Turin or Berlin? Or that the silverware or one linen tablecloth or the chipped enamel pot--the one with the red stripe, handed down by a mother to her daughter--were later used by a neighbour or someone they never knew? Or if one went first or last; or whether they were separated getting on the train or off the train; or whether they were taken from Athens or Amst..
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instant
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Anne Michaels |
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31c6a31
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Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.
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Anne Michaels |
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da3dd51
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If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you'll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You'll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in..
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Anne Michaels |
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7e78022
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And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number.
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Anne Michaels |
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a5288d6
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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
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war
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Anne Michaels |
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1d3cc04
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Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.
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Anne Michaels |
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53a9a73
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In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands. The insane task was not futile only in the sense that faith is not futile. A camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they'd once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitu..
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Anne Michaels |
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dbd3b57
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Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes follow her across the field, stepping from her clothes, strewn silk glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves to be looked at, swimming all night across the river.
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Anne Michaels |
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1a3bb5e
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Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts - that they were on the edge of lifelong happiness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow. It was as if, long ago, a part of him had broken off inside, and now finally, he recognized the dangerous fragment that had been floating in his system, causing him intermittent pain over the years. As if he could now say of that ache: "Ah. It wa..
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pain
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Anne Michaels |