Kendra_Smith_Laughs’s Reviews > Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation > Status Update

"The mechanism of life is jammed, the way minutes and hours and days knit themselves, gather in the separate strands and knit them fast together into life, into being - it is jammed, blocked, broken."

"Once, perhaps, their differences had invigorated them, but as time passed they seemed to find something more troubling in them, something whose deadliness became ever more apparent as they themselves neared death. It was as though, in old age, they were coming to the realisation that because of one another they had not lived."

"Marriage keeps other people outside, my friend says. In marriage you go away from other people, but at the end of marriage they come out to welcome you back. This is civilisation, she says. The worst thing that happened to you has brought out the best in them. My daughters like this friend of mine."

"(...) eyes strained against the darkness of my own ignorance, I struggled to comprehend the grandeur and violence of the adult world, to grasp its double nature of seeming and being. And in this duplicity, this difference between how things looked and what they were, was something I couldn't be reconciled (...) In much the same way I saw the romance of marriage as a covering for something unapologetically practical"

"I remember from childhood how easy it was to imagine, how hard to create: the difference between what I could conceive of and what I could actually do was bewildering. In adulthood I have learned that to envisage is nothing: success is a hard currency, earned by actual excellence."

"Form is both safety and imprisonment, both protector and dissembler: form, in the end, conceals the truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. Form is rigid, inviolable, devastatingly correct; that is its vulnerability. Form can be broken. It will tolerate variation but not transgression; it can be broken but at what cost? If it is destroyed what can be put in its place?"

"There are two tombs, just as there were two people: separation is a demand for space, the expression of the self's need to regain its integrity. The double tomb, like the double bed, symbolises the power to erase these distinctions."

"Someone new has moved in next door and erected his sound system on the other side of my bedroom wall. All night the electronic pulses probe and torment the space between us. I wander through the dark house, checking the locks on the doors and windows, for it feels as though the outside is coming in, as though a wall of defence has come down, as though the doors and windows may as well not be there at all."

"I see that I have exchanged one kind of prestige for another, one set of values for another, one scale for another. I see too that we are more open, more capable of receiving than we were; that should the world prove to be a generous and wondrous place, we will perceive its wonders."

"We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom. The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised but essentially the same."