Irene

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Kathryn Schulz
“It is this harsh corrective to our sense of being central, competent, and powerful that makes even trivial losses so difficult to accept. To lose something is a profoundly humbling act. It forces us to confront the limits of our mind: the fact that we left our wallet at the restaurant; the fact that we can’t remember where we left our wallet at all. It forces us to confront the limits of our will: the fact that we are powerless to protect the things we love from time and change and chance. Above all, it forces us to confront the limits of existence: the fact that, sooner or later, it is in the nature of almost everything to vanish or perish. Over and over, loss calls on us to reckon with this universal impermanence—with the baffling, maddening, heartbreaking fact that something that was just here can be, all of a sudden, just gone.”
Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

Kathryn Schulz
“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

Kathryn Schulz
“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

Kathryn Schulz
“That is how I feel: that finding one’s beloved is an “Astonishment,” to borrow the title of that Szymborska poem, because, cosmically speaking, there is so much time and space in which not to do so.”
Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

Kathryn Schulz
“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

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117 books — 27 voters

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