Time's Shabby Curtains

"Amid death and groaning wooden power and the wet complexity of moss and fungus and vines - from the same solemn pit, silliness pops up to dangle its tassles. Jamie. Alain. Joanne. We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder to have a form because we have one on the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass, blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don't even know what it is, or what it's for.

Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand. I touch the hazelnut bush gently as I pass." - Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

It is always hard to end chapters in your life. You find yourself stubbornly clinging to all the good bits, afraid to let them go, blind to the decay and the signs warning you that you have reached the end of the road.

When you get to the end you always wonder why you bothered to make the journey in the first place, it is so painful and sad when all is said and done - but later, as time parts its shabby curtain, it dawns on you that you were just being human, desperately trying to connect and reach out and gain understanding. And even if you failed miserably, at least you are one of the many human beings still throwing your lot in with the rest, wordlessly hoping that eventually you will find a road that leads you to a good long respite.

Anne + Veronica = Trebled Intensity and Hot, Rippling Heaven

"Excitement hung around Anne like a garment, shone in her eyes, kindled in every feature. She had come dancing up the lane like a wind-blown sprite, through the mellow sunshine and lazy shadows of an August evening.
...

For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature. All "spirit and fire and dew," as she was, the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity. Marilla felt this and was vaguely troubled over it, realizing that the ups and downs of existence would probably bear hardly on this impulsive soul and not sufficiently understanding that the equally great capacity for delight might more than compensate.

Therefore Marilla conceived it to be her duty to drill Anne into a tranquil uniformity of disposition as impossible and alien to her as to a dancing sunbeam in one of the brook shallows. She did not make much headway, as she sorrowfully admitted to herself. The downfall of some dear hope or plan plunged Anne into "deeps of affliction." The fulfillment thereof exalted her to dizzy realms of delight. Marilla had almost begun to despair of ever fashioning this waif of the world into her model little girl of demure manners and prim deportment. Neither would she have believed that she really liked Anne much better as she was." - Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery

* * *

"My forehead breaks into a sweat. I unfasten a button and loosen my scarf. The air cools my skin; the fever recoils, then sends hot tadpoles wiggling against the cold. Drive the animal before you and never stop. Starve it, cut it, stuff silicone in it. Feed it until it's too fat to think or feel. Then cut it open and suck the fat out. Sew it up and give it medication for pain. Make it run on the treadmill, faster, faster. Examine it for flaws. Not just the body, but the mind too. Keep going over the symptoms. It's not a character defect; it's an illness. Give it medication for pain. Dazzle its eyes with visions of beauty. Dazzle its ears with music that never stops playing. Send it to graze in vast aisles of food so huge and flawless that it seems to be straining to become more than food. Dazzle its mind with visions of terror. Send it chasing a hot, rippling heaven from which illness and pain have been removed forever. Set it fleeing the silent darkness that is always at its heels. Suck it out. Sew it up. Run. When the dark comes, pray: I love my ass." - Veronica, Mary Gaitskill

* * *
"'Some people are naturally good, you know, and others are not. I'm one of the others, Mrs Lynde says I'm full of original sin. No matter how hard I try to be good I can never make such a success of it as those who are naturally good. It's a good deal like geometry I suspect. But don't you think that trying so hard ought to count for something?'" Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery

* * *
"Sometimes I saw the goodwill and the deep things and longed to know them. Sometimes I saw the bony jaw and the thrusting calves and turned up my nose. Because I could never fully have either feeling, I stayed detached. It was as if I were seventeen again and longing to live inside a world of music - a world that was sad at being turned into a machine, but ecstatic, too, singing on the surface of its human heart as the machine spread through its tissues and silenced the flow of its blood. In this world, there were no deep things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty and even songs about mass death could be sung on the light and playful surface of the heart." - Veronica, Mary Gaitskill

* * *
"'Oh Marilla, there is something in me today that makes me just love everybody I see.' she exclaimed as she washed the breakfast dishes. 'You don't know how good I feel! Wouldn't it be nice if it could last?'" Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery