|
ee9d63a
|
You need to see everything else--everyone else--as expendable, as less than yourself.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
1eddcd4
|
When you're young - but even now - how do you understand this?' he said when he first spoke of it, walking the night streets. 'You can't understand it. It makes no sense. You can allow yourself to be swallowed by your anger, but this will kill you. And yet how can you look at the panther, how can you look him in the eye, when he won't stay still? When he's nowhere and everywhere, belongs to no one and to everyone? So if you're me, how you d..
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
63d194c
|
MY MOTHER assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point. Not in the "she moved to Tucson" sense, but in the sense that "we grew apart."
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
f114b8c
|
It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/ daughter/ friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL."
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
460a752
|
It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you'll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city. Or
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
6e02ea4
|
Nobody would know me from my own description of myself;
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
9e90d69
|
We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lolloping Labrador, and not a soul registers that we are furious. We're completely invisible. I thought it wasn't true, or n..
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
82a744a
|
My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'd lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced?
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
a07ae2b
|
No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say "Fuck off" to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all."
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
91cc17b
|
Don't plan it, don't overthink it, just let it happen, you've got to find a way to bridge the chasm from here to there, from this unthinkable present to some unthinkable future . . .
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
6ba25d2
|
It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
492122c
|
I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another--desire, by another name--is the source of almost every sorrow.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
feb06c8
|
But you see, everyone has a part to play. In this theater, I'm a daughter and a sister and a mother--never an artist. I could be, I don't know, Luc Tuymans, and it would mean nothing to them. They allow no room for anything but my duty.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
fa594c6
|
It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves. Sirena,
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
eda3095
|
The simplest and least flattering explanation was always the right one, I'd learned over the years. But
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
7c83365
|
I always thought I'd live in Paris, Rome, Madrid--at least for a while. It strikes me now that I didn't dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl's fantasy, a blanched almond of a fantasy. Today, even that is enough to clench my fists and curl my toes. In
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
8d6a1aa
|
It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is F*** YOU ALL."
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
f19496d
|
Never let the sun go down on an argument," she said. "Because one of us might die in the night," I said, as I'd replied since I was small. But this time, she laughed, a dry, sad laugh. "One of us just might, Mouse."
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
66919b7
|
What would it be like to have been locked up in one of those cells for weeks or months or even years, only to discover that you'd never really been a lunatic at all, and could just as easily - if only the world had been a bit different - have been home in your bedroom all along? That would mean that you couldn't be sure about things. Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the two types of ..
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
d683ae4
|
It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/ daughter/ friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we'r..
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
d0e8409
|
I measure my life out in books." "You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?"
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
b0ac773
|
But our friendship was, at the same time, like a city you hadn't visited in a long time, where you know the streets by heart but the shops and restaurants have changed, so you can find your way from the church to the town square, no problem, but you don't know where to get ice cream or a decent sandwich.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
7933648
|
Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren't really feeling what you're feeling, it doesn't make the feeling go away.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
0209d03
|
But we don't really know anything at all, except how the story should go, and we make believe it's our story, hoping everything will turn out okay. The difference is that onstage, or in a film, we acknowledge the artifice, we accept that we've made a world that excludes what we ignore. Like gods, we invent a world that makes sense.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
a73843d
|
Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized-a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle-then this only makes the pictures the more mine.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |
|
a0ef3b5
|
We wouldn't be proper children if we didn't disregard our parents' most vital instruction.
|
|
|
Claire Messud |