Emma > Recent Status Updates

'But think, my lord. If you call a traitor everyone who has voiced a dislike of the king or his proceedings, who does that leave alive?'

'Me,' he says. Henry and Cromwell. Cromwell and Henry.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

He believes the king wants to scramble onto a fast horse: away he spurs, over that same mountaintop, where out of sight a new day dawns, where the past has ceased to repeat itself, caught up in a loop, a stitch, a noose....He leaves his queens, before they can leave him.

..what was clearly at stake, Graves argued, was the need for 'much better American understanding of the forces which are contending with the American idea for acceptance by the Near East. The principal of these are, of course, communism and Islam." Out of such a concern, and as a contemporary adjunct to the more backward-looking Am. Oriental Society, was born the entire vast apparatus for research on the Middle East.

The rich man can slaughter as he pleases, if his pocket can bear the fines, but the poor man cannot afford one murder across his lifetime.

It's as if the lights have fused. I'm here in the black truth.

Of course I looked sad. But I didn't really feel sad. Or it wasn't a sadness that hurt, not an all-through one. I rather enjoyed it. Beastly, but I did. I sang on the way home. The romance, the mystery of it. Living.

I had a feeling I've had once or twice before, of the most peculiar closeness to him - not love or attraction or sympathy in any way. But linked destiny. Like being shipwrecked on an island - a raft - together. In every way not wanting to be together. But together.

Mit einem kombinierten israelisch-amerikanischen Großangriff auf den letzten großen Gegner der Dominanz Amerikas in der Region, den Iran, im Sommer letzten Jahres (!!) führt Trump vor, dass die USA über allen Gewaltdingen im Nahen Osten stehen und entschlossen sind, sich die Region von dieser Warte aus komplett neu anzueignen...

I don't want much.
'I know you don't. Only the things that I have to give anyway. The way I look and speak and move. But I'm other things. I have other things to give. And I can't give them to you, because I don't love you.'

Even if I'd led a normal life, like the women before, I would still have found myself at the dawn of my last day. Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

'Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that's not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it's any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I'll never be able to use it.'

His dreams are oppressive: he finds himself at a landing stage, the opposite bank out of view. The river widening, nothing but the grey still water stretching away, polished pewter reflecting a silver sky: no bank in view because there is no bank, because the water has become eternity, because his flesh is dissolved in it; because his stories merge, all memories flatten to one.

You look back into your past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day?...is this my essence, twisting into a paper's flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself- slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon?

Isabel did not startle. She knew Eva was there, knew she had approached. She would never not know. She would never leave a room again and not leave half of her behind.

Arousal, when it came, was an inconvenience - a wrench in the routine and a distraction. It was a heavy blanket weighing her down in the night, it was the drag of honey into lungs.

That night, she woke up with the dredges of a dream still hot in her mouth: a pooling heat in her belly, the drag of a hand, the puff of breath on her neck. She thought someone had been in her room, but there was no one. There was only she.

These last few years you have carried a great burden, and carried it alone - [...] You are stooped, you are worn, you are bowed under the weight of your past, and you are only twenty years old. Now let go. Let others bear the burden, who are stronger, and appointed by God to carry the cares of state. Look up at the world, instead of down at your prayer book. Try smiling. You'll be surprised how much better you feel.

Henry's father is ill, but he is not ready to die. This is a problem for the king himself. It is an even more serious problem for everyone else. A semi-functioning king is far worse for the realm than a dead one.

When the final overtures for peace have been made and refused, a little after midday, the trumpets and drums sound. The cry 'Advance banner!' goes up. Then, to a chorus of yells, the twang and quiet hiss of arrow-shot begins on both sides. Soon the sky is hailing sharp death.

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings

Grief boundeth where it falls, / Not with the empty hollowness, but weight. / I take my leave before I have begun; / For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done.

[Richard II] satisfied himself on the basis of one brief visit that he now understood all Ireland's problems.*
*This remains a common English delusion. (lol)

Mercy has now entered into her old age. She is the lady of the house, but she mostly keeps to her own part, a book open on her knees. She reminds him of an image of St. Barbara he saw once in Antwerp, a saint reading against the noise of a construction site, backed by scaffolding and raw brick.

The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

He is reminded of a picture he saw once in the Low Countries, of a saint being flayed alive. The skin of the man's calves was folded neatly over his ankles, like soft boots, and his face wore an expression of unblinking serenity.

His past lies about him like a burnt house. He has been building, building, but it has taken him years to sweep up the mess.

The square is empty again; and he himself only a black shape against the brickwork, a fragment cut out of the night. If I ever need to vanish, he says, this is where I shall do it.

He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feathers breath from you.