How have these people been rescued and disappointed? What will happen to them, what’s happening to them now? Nothing much, probably. Errands and trudging work-hours, school for the boy, everybody’s nightly television. Or something else. Who knows? They do, of course, each of them, carry within them a jewel of self, not just the wounds and the hopes but an innerness, what Beethoven might have called the soul, that self-ember we carry, the simple fact of all aliveness, all snarled up with dream and memory but other than a dream and memory, other than the moment (crossing a street, leaving a bakery): that minor infinitude, the private universe in which you have always been and will always be buzzing along on a skateboard or looking for coins in the bottom of your purse or going home with your fussing children. What did Shakespeare say? Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.
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| — | From By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham (via elliptical) |
