nathan’s Reviews > The Stillest Day: A Novel > Status Update

Life. I float away from you. At last I’m born away. From life. Life which is perhaps best lived as a dream.

…I prayed to color. I prayed to texture. I prayed to pain. But I never, ever, prayed to God. I felt that I had done enough for Him. I absolved myself of any further responsibility. Back and forth I went to my point of stillness. Godless.

I must stop this. Memory maddens. Mad memories are breaking my mind.

…he would see that I am a study, an étude in three forms of possession, that of mind, that of soul, that of body. A perfect, living self-portrait. In exquisite pieces. And it is in reflection that they float together to form a whole. Sometimes, reflected in water, I can see someone else behind me. Just a face. The face of a woman. I never see the face of the child.

Art is a dream behind the eyes. And not only for the artist. And the imagined unimaginable is always recog-nised as it swoons onto canvas in a faint of colour.

"[Mothers] are afraid of that we may learn to move away from them finally. So they guide us towards their chosen exit which is never truly the way out. It is just another door they open for us into a room they have designed."

"...you were trapped, were you not, by a mother? As we all are...Predatory. They're all predatory."

"If I had just one part of you I would spend a lifetime in its worship. To have all of you might cause such terror in me. Where, where to begin?.."

"I want to see myself as you see me. Is that what the mirror does? Arouse our own desire for ourselves in order to comprehend the desire of the other? Desire? Where do these words come from?"

I sat before the image of Mathew Pearson's face which mirrored mine and we spoke a little. Like lovers. Those who do not have imaginary conversations do not love.
The unspoken words that fall and flow are simply a world made word.
Other conversations which we consider real are pale echoes of our secret speech. They are only games of hide and seek within a maze of sound.

From then on, my body and my soul seemed to
separate, my soul to go about its secret worship, my body, a lonely entity, left to thread its well-worn path through the known hours of my known days. That body which once I had believed to be the adequate even fine residence of a mind at peace with the internal and external contours of my daily life.