Status Updates From Study for Obedience

"and then my breathing would become rapid and shallow and my blood vessels would constrict and I would need to steady myself, and I thought of the desert, which seemed to me an ideal habitat, a habitat so full of nothing, replete with it, a nothing that would settle on one’s shoulders and keep one company."

"Whenever I recalled my own behaviour, I worked to effect in myself a sense of shame and perhaps even of terror, two small bubbles bobbing up against one another inside me, feeding off one another, becoming more active, becoming malignant, feeding off their host, growing prodigiously in size, pressing against my insides, suffocating, suffocating,"

"I tried to take myself in hand, it was not goodness I delivered in those moments, goodness, I reminded myself, did not announce itself, goodness was moderate, it submitted."

"Well into adulthood and even with the best will in the world, I still had not mastered the art of the well-tempered refusal, still I was overcome with fits of magnanimity, which visited me suddenly and at inopportune moments, causing any person who had shown me the slightest kindness to feel a swift sense of regret, my rush of generosity overcame them, it could hardly be matched, no response was possible."

"I said so little and yet it was too much. Much too much. I vowed to make myself smaller and smaller, on numerous occasions throughout my life I had made this same vow,"

"I had observed that nobody ever did seem any better off for my intervention. I felt this had to do with the vagaries of human suffering, and yet at times I wondered what this might say about me, some spiritual poverty of mine, no doubt, a failure of attention, even though it was my attention, or more precisely and usually my presence at the point of a reckless and personal disclosure, that seemed to be the problem."

"I had difficulty for instance understanding my life in terms of the hero’s journey that, according to a documentary I had seen on television in my early teens, characterised the myths and legends that themselves formed the basis of the narratives by which many nations, religions, ethnic groups, tribes, families and even individual people understood themselves."

"As I walked through the woods, at times I thought – perhaps after all not everyone wished me ill. And then I would hear a voice inside me say: No, no. Not likely."

"and yet to his credit he worked hard to maintain a sense of shame in himself, it did not come naturally to him as it did to me, that abiding state of disgrace. In a sense, he had said, patting my hand, affliction simplifies everything."

"My siblings had naturally always supported me in this endeavour, encouraging me to suppress any hint of ambition or even self-love as it arose, my eldest brother in particular had long ago devoted himself to the pursuit of the sacred, which he felt could only be found through the daily mortification of the spirit, mine more often than not,"

"I was used to being alone. Since girlhood I had an instinct for retreat, knowing perhaps even then that withdrawing into myself was my only talent, the only way I had and ever would have of exercising any control over the situations in which I found myself in the course of my life, a control that was negligible but nevertheless all I had."

"Nevertheless, eager to prove themselves broadminded, enlightened, perhaps even (they may have whispered, smiling, to themselves) liberal, I was elected to this unsought role of treasurer a number of times over the course of my professional life."

"wherever I had been in my life I was always an incomer, an offlander, sometimes a usurper, more rarely a conniver, it was something in my blood that made me feel this way and likewise something in my blood that made others feel this too, that I was strange somehow, not to be trusted."

"I was not from the place, and so I was not anything. I was a nothing, a stranger who was not wanted but who nevertheless imposed herself continually, day after day, a kind of spectral presence hovering at the edges of the life of the town, whose intentions were obscure and who for some reason evinced a terrible fidelity to the idea of staying put."

"Who was I? Why had I come? I was not from the town, that much was clear, not even from the surrounding areas, and, unlike my brother, I lacked the essential quality that would have enabled me to overcome these basic failings."

One never knew how one’s gifts might be received.

"One never knew how one’s gifts might be received."

"As I bit into the last strawberry, I began to weep because language, I felt, was no longer at our disposal, because there was nothing in the word that we could use. Nothing settled in place."

"I accumulated fidelities in this space of diminishing returns."

"Soon we would no longer need to withdraw to the desert for a space of contemplation and self-abnegation. Soon, personal ascesis would arrive in the form of one more letter, one more mass mortality event, one more migration stopped by total annihilation"

"Lives layered upon lives, the concentric logic of the world and its continual co-optations."

"I felt a renewed sense of shame and failure for being unable to do the same, for providing further evidence of the arrogance of English speakers, the way they contrived, by virtue of their tongue, to bring destruction with them wherever they went in the world, and I was sorry for the townspeople who, I knew, must, with the passage of time, only grow to resent this failure."

"my brother who as I say spoke fluently, having mastered the regional accent and even the local idiom, his difference was barely perceptible, his proximity to the dominant culture within a hair’s breadth,"

"There was so much one had to live up to, so many good deeds one had no reasonable expectation of carrying out, because of one’s resources, because of one’s will, and they would loom over the whole of one’s life, these specific failures, representing metonymically as it were the profound spiritual failure of one’s life, the community always holding one to account."

"I had always had a feeling for churches, especially country churches such as this one, surrounded by trees, planted perhaps at the time of the church’s construction, the church and trees growing together over the years, over the centuries, such a long and unbroken life this town had!"

"For all things come to an end, yes, as the lives of my forebears had come to an end, life itself and life as they knew it, never knowing, never understanding why or wherefore, only that a feeling, running under the seams for centuries, had broken to the surface."

"Another way of putting this is I began to take note of the rhythms of the place, and even, from a distance, of the town."

"If I could be anything, I thought, sitting on my rock, eating a granola bar, I would be that ice, with its multitudes, always in the process of transformation."

"What were they for? Company, yes, external signs of my existence, of my living self. And then also gestures of thanksgiving to the place, offerings to the world around me."

"Was it possible for muscle memory to be historical? The patterning of the basket, this particular basket, passed down through the generations, living in latency, only just activated in me, inexplicably, on a clear day after a storm."