Status Updates From La strada

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.”

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable….The crushing black vacuum of the universe… Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

“What had he seen? A drainpipe. A trellis. The dark serpentine of a dead vine running down it like the track of some enterprise upon a graph.”

Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would’ve thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom, shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.”
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“He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat.
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“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”