Bokelskere.no

Hva om jeg mislykkes med å ta meg av dette barnet?
Hva om jeg ikke får dette barnet til å trives, hva om jeg ikke får dette barnet til å elske meg?
Og enda verre, langt verre, så mye verre at det er utenkelig, bortsett fra at jeg tenkte det, og alle som noensinne har ventet på å kunne ta med seg et spedbarn hjem, tenker det: Hva om jeg ikke klarer å elske dette barnet?

I teorien tjener disse minnegjenstandene til å bringe stunden tilbake. I virkeligheten tjener de bare til å gjøre klart hvor utilstrekkelig jeg verdsatte stunden da den var der. Hvor utilstrekkelig jeg verdsatte stunden da den var der, er også noe jeg aldri kunne tillate meg å forstå.

trying to locate a line I believed to be from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques but was never able to find: “The tropics are not exotic, they are merely out of date.”

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day’s mail with real enthusiasm—maybe it is Vogue, maybe it is Foreign Affairs, whatever it is we are intensely interested, pleased to have this handbook to keeping up, this key to staying alive—yet the next day we are walking uptown on Madison past Barney’s and Armani or on Park past the Council on Foreign Relations and we are not even glancing at their windows.

The familiar phrase “need to know” surfaces. The phrase “need to know” has been the problem all along. Only one person needs to know. She is of course the one person who needs to know. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep. I imagine telling her. I am able to imagine telling her because I still see her.

I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.