Perhaps Love Is Essential Because

And If You Had No Tongue, No Celebrating Language, You’d Do This: Cross Your Hands At The Wrist With Palms Facing Towards You; Place Your Crossed Wrists Over Your Heart (the Middle Of Your Chest, Anyway); Then Move Your Hands Outwards A Short Distance, And Open Them Towards The Object Of Your Love. It’s Just As Eloquent As Speech.

Not Merely Hope, But Any Burdensome Yearning: Ambition, Hatred, Love (especially Love) - How Rarely Do Our Emotions Meet The Object They Seem To Deserve? How Hopelessly We Signal; How Dark The Sky; How Big The Waves. We Are All Lost At See, Washed Between Hope And Despair, Hailing Something That May Never Come To Rescue Us. Catastrophe Has Become Art; But This Is No Reducing Process. It Is Freeing, Enlarging, Explaining. Catastrophe Has Become Art: That Is, After All, What It Is For.

Perhaps The World Progresses Not By Maturing, But By Being In A Permanent State Of Adolescence, Of Thrilled Discovery.

Discovering, For Example, That As Witnesses To Your Life Diminish, There Is Less Corroboration, And Therefore Less Certainty, As To What You Are Or Have Been. [p. 65]

When You’re Young You Prefer The Vulgar Months, The Fullness Of The Seasons. As You Grow Older You Learn To Like The In-between Times, The Months That Can’t Make Up Their Minds. Perhaps It’s A Way Of Admitting That Things Can’t Ever Bear The Same Certainty Again.