Shivani’s Reviews > The Hour of the Star > Status Update

In the end she was no more than a music box that was slightly out of tune.
I ask you:
—What is the weight of light?

As soon as you discover the truth it's already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is?
Reply: it's not.
But do not mourn the dead: they know what they are doing.

Her effort to live seemed like something that, if shed never felt it, virgin that she was, she nevertheless intuited, because only now was she understanding that a woman is born a woman from the very first cry. A woman's destiny is to be a woman.(...)Yes, painful and such a difficult reflowering that she used for it her body and the other thing you call a soul and I call — what?

I could leave her lying on the street and simply not finish the story. But no: I'll go on to where the air runs out, I'll go to where the great gale leaps away howl-ing, I'll go to where the void begins to curve, I'll go where my breath takes me. Does my breath deliver me to God? I am so pure that I know nothing. I only know one thing: I don't need to pity God. Or do I?

I could wrap it up by taking the easiest route, killing the infant-girl, but I want the worst thing of all: life. So let those who read me get punched in the stomach to see if it's good. Life is a punch in the stomach.

But who can tell if she wasn't needing to die? Because there are times when a person needs a little bitty death and doesn't even know it. As for me, I substitute the act of death for a symbol of it. A symbol that can be summed up in a deep kiss but not on a rough wall but mouth-to-mouth in the agony of pleasure that is death. I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection.

And my life stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all costs and replies that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I die in the end.
If that's the way it is, so be it.)

(But who am I to rebuke the guilty? The worst part is that I have to forgive them. We must reach such a nothing that we indifferently love or don't love the criminal who kills us. But I'm not sure of myself: I have to ask, though I don't know who can answer, if I really have to love the one who slays me and ask who amongst you slays me.

Just as people had always done nothing for her, except that now at least they were glancing at her, which gave her an existence.

She was supersonic in life. Nobody noticed that with her existence she was breaking the sound barrier. For other people she didn't exist.