Irene

“And we love as we mourn, with wildly variegated, equally sincere emotions. In addition to everything lofty and lusty, love is also being hurt when your wife is brusque with you or annoyed when you realize that your husband has walked past the cat vomit all day without cleaning it up; it is alternately intervening and forbearing when your beloved bites her nails, and listening patiently as your partner vents at length about his boss when you really just want to get back to reading your book. There is no enduring love on the planet, nor ever has been, that isn’t characterized by these crisscrossing moods. “Whoever supposes,” Montaigne once wrote, “to see me look sometimes coldly, sometimes lovingly, on my wife, that either look is feigned, is a fool.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

“Life, too, goes by contraries. It is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can't get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling, can't strain out the ostensible impurities in pursuit of some imaginary essence. And we shouldn't want to if we could. The world, in all its complexities, calls on us to respond in kind. So that to be conflicted is not to be adulterated--it is to be complete.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

“Mariez-vous, mon ami, vous ne savez pas ce que c’est que de vivre seul, à mon âge. La solitude, aujourd’hui, m’emplit d’une angoisse horrible : la solitude dans le logis, auprès du feu, le soir. Il me semble alors que je suis seul sur la terre, affreusement seul, mais entouré de dangers vagues, de choses inconnues et terribles ; et la cloison qui me sépare de mon voisin que je ne connais pas, m’éloigne de lui autant que des étoiles aperçues par ma fenêtre. Une sorte de fièvre m’envahit, une fièvre de douleur et de crainte, et le silence des murs m’épouvante. Il est si profond et si triste, le silence de la chambre où l’on vit seul. Ce n’est pas seulement un silence autour du corps, mais un silence autour de l’âme, et, quand un meuble craque, on tressaille jusqu’au cœur, car aucun bruit n’est attendu dans ce morne logis.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami

“Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir