Phyllis > Recent Status Updates

At the time…, this already good-sized village was also fortified, which conferred upon it the…benefit of a permanent garrison of Spanish soldiers, who taught modesty to the girls and women of the town, gave an occasional tap on the back to a husband or father, and, at summer's end, never failed to spread out into the vineyards to thin the grapes and relieve the peasants of the trouble of harvesting them.

I should have gone to bed, but felt that I might never return to this place…The island was a deep, dark green now, the meadows rank with cocksfoot, reed grass, and billowing clouds of meadowsweet that turned silver as the wind passed across it. The island was waiting for us to leave, to become wild again. And, now, I was ready to go home. Like Anna, I had a place to care for, and it was time to go back and do that.

Perhaps islands are like farms, almost impossible to pass down the generations without someone getting hurt. We cannot be what we are and what we aspire to be at the same time, something in us has to die for something else to be born.

Rarely have I seen anyone so absorbed in each living moment. I began to understand the old Norwegian myths about the rocks and mountains coming alive, shapeshifting into creatures that were half human and half geology. This way of living demanded a loss of self, a surrendering to the rocks, rain, wind, and tides. I was coming to see that those tales were about the people themselves.

We do not think of watching the world around us as work. Work is usually muscular and rushed at - but that was a misplaced way of thinking on the island. Even on the busiest days of the season that followed, there were always quiet hours when Anna simply watched. She drew no distinction between looking out the window and physically doing jobs - they were one and the same.

This slow day by the fire…was quite unlike my normal life. The clock on the wall had stopped and no one cared. We were now governed by the rain, the clouds passing over, whatever the seabirds were doing, and the endlessly changing light. But above all it was the tides that dominated our waking hours. The island breathed beneath us, giant sighing breaths: in, and the water fell away, out, and the water rushed back.

Our lives are a series of choices - about what we do, and don't do. Over time we decide what to let go of, what must die, and what we will fight to keep alive. Sometimes these are big, deliberate decisions, other times change happens in a thousand thoughtless little moments.

At high tide, there were only a few small acres that I could walk around, much of it fissured and cracked slabs of rock. I was learning that our dreams of islands as places of freedom and escape are fanciful - an island is defined by constraints and limits.

Ours is a dark and chaotic world. We are all in need of lights to follow. On that island I felt I had met someone who had made a life on her own terms. I was increasingly sure that I, on the other hand, had notmy father died…[&] several elders from our community…whom I had looked to for guidance when I was young. And, as the years passed, I began to feel unmoored, like a piece of timber drifting on the current.

Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose.

I walked over, opened the rear door, climbed into the rear seat. The engine started and we were off again. There I sat, Henry Chinaski, Class of Summer '39, driving into the bright future.
No, being driven. At the first red light the car stalled. As the signal turned green my father was still trying to start the engine. Somebody behind us honked. My father got the car started and we were in motion again.

Everybody knew something I didn't know.
The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one. …
And yet I knew that what I saw wasn't as simple and good as it appeared. There was a price to be paid for it all, a general falsity, that could be easily believed, and could be the first step down a dead-end street.

I sat down on the couch. Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become obvious yourself.

We stood in line, each of us waiting to march across the stage. In the audience were our parents and friends.
"I'm about to puke," said one of the guys.
"We only go from crap to more crap," said another.
The girls seemed to be more serious about it. That's why I didn't really trust them. They seemed to be part of the wrong things. They and the school seemed to have the same song.

There was always somebody pushing me who had no right to push.

We were the way we were, and we didn't want to be anything else. We all came from Depression families and most of us were ill-fed, yet we had grown up to be huge and strong. Most of us, I think, got little love from our families, and we didn't ask for love or kindness from anybody.We were a joke but people were careful not to laugh in front of us…as if we had grown up too soon and we were bored with being children.

Stanley was right. I never hit another home run. I struck out most of the time. But they always remembered that home run and while they still hated me, it was a *better* kind of hatred, like they weren’t quite sure *why.*

But all day today, any time I have thought of the cabinet of junk, a sadness has taken hold of me. Sita is the reason all those things are there... They will outlast her as they have already outlasted her husband. They will outlast me. Common things, but with a power we cannot match. It makes me sad to think of them, so humble yet indestructible, while Sita, for all her desperation of a lifetime, must die.

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick," Susan Sontag wrote in “Illness as Metaphor.” "Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."

Alone in my bed, after everyone had gone, I sensed a feasting taking place under my skin, something wending its way through my arteries, gnawing at my sanity. As my energy evaporated and the itch intensified, I told myself it was because the parasite's appetite was growing. But deep down, I doubted there ever was a parasite. I began to wonder if the real problem was me.

When Fritzie came home she stopped smoking for good. … After a few tobaccoless, idle months, her face bloomed from acid yellow, to peach, to rose. She gained weight and let her hair grow from the peroxide bleach to brown. She had been hard, one track, always someone to reckon with, but now she softened. Overnight she became a stout woman of no particular menace.

The shop was my perfect home…floors were cast of concrete with hot-water pipes running through them for warmth. The thick walls were finished off with stucco, painted a smooth glossy white. Because the doorways were rounded, the place seemed like a cave carved out of a hillside. The light fell green and watery through thick glass window-blocks except in the kitchen where the screen door let through a blast of sun.

My mind hardened, faceted and gleaming like a magic stone, and I saw my mother clearly.
…
All night she fell through the awful cold. Her coat flapped open and her black dress wrapped tightly around her legs. Her red hair flowed straight upward like a flame. She was a candle that gave no warmth. My heart froze. I had no love for her. That is why, by morning, I allowed her to hit the earth.

When her fingers released the card into the mail slot she thought that she felt nothing..as she was falling asleep to Aunt Fritzie's adding machine, she imagined she saw the postcard alight in her mother's hands. Adelaide stared down and examined each detail of the picture, butshe could not see her daughter, who was too small to tell of, looking directly through her, not dead but securely hidden in the aerial view.

…Fleur Pillager proceeded to knead, mold, and tap the floating splinters of my bones back into the shape of ankles, feeling her own from time to time to get the shape right. The packets I thought were flour were really plaster of Paris. Out of it she made my casts and shaped them with carved splinters from the only branch within a mile of the railroad rack, the apple branch, torn from an Argus tree...

On a cold spring morning in 1932 the train brought both an addition and a subtraction. They came by freight. By the time they reached Argus their lips were violet and their feet were so numb that, when they jumped out of the boxcar, they stumbled and scraped their palms and knees through the cinders.

Close your eyes and imagine, first, a cold and angry emptiness. The emptiness roars around you. You are on a sea, hurtling where the wind and water take you. You fall and you rise in darkness. The falling is fast and unforgiving and twists your gut as you count the seconds downward. The rising is worse. The sea towers forty feet above you, and you know only the terror that comes before falling.

..despite the importance of this place and these specks, I don't enjoy being down here. ... Something about the pre-life-ness of it, which in a way is death, though Orly would tell me I'm mad, that this place is the opposite of death. Maybe it's the stasis of it then, the way that life is being kept dormant. Maybe it has nothing to do with the seeds at all, and is simply the underground of it, or the deep, deep cold.

That she should have been so clear in her intention suggests that by the age of sixteen, if not sooner, Rosalind had realised what Albert Einstein had gradually learned about himself: that a scientist makes science “the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”