It took me a good five minutes to recall what I'd eaten for dinner less than three hours earlier; the chicken-and-rice dish mustn't have been terribly piquant.
This has been running through my mind for a couple of days--the last line. I'm looking forward to the long weekend coming up. I have some stuff to work out.
I think that most of us are haunted deep within by a sense of lost perfection, by the nagging feeling not just that things could be better but they once were better; that we can actually, in our hearts, recall a feeling of joy that we cannot reproduce, and that is our ultimate agony. It’s not just that we can imagine utter happiness, it’s that we’ve tasted it.... And having tasted it, nothing else tastes the same, which is why so much of life is so bitterly sweet.
I don’t think we ever stop trying to find it again, that sense of infinite well-being and security. Deep in our hearts we all long for a sort of Restoration. That’s what love offers: our only chance back to an ethereal communion we once enjoyed. And maybe that’s why love even at first sight feels so much like a reunion.
And without love? Without love we are like songbirds who cannot sing.
I can make you some Chicken and Rice Creole that is plenty piquant ;)
ReplyDeleteOne thing seems important to note here: okra is very wrong.
Deleteno worries there, I do not even use okra in my gumbo ;)
DeleteI found you!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis was supposed to say that I agree with this, and I think some folks are more attuned to that loss than others. Why, I dunno.
DeleteTrue, that. I am, and I feel a kinship with those who are. But I admire those who are impervious.
DeleteThe folk tale goes that Nostalgia literally interpretted means "the pain from an old wound".
ReplyDeleteOh, are you the sort who keeps jabbing at an old pain, just to see if it's gone yet, too? Strange. 8)
Delete"And I know there must be something wrong in wanting to silence any song" - Robert Frost "A Minor Bird"
ReplyDeleteDear God, that's a beautiful excerpt. What is the song we sing of love? What tune is it, and what key? It could as easily be a screech owl... but then, there is beauty in even the coarsest song.
I think that love is easy, but desire is hard.
It's a wonderful book. Astoundingly sad, of course. Add it to your list!
DeleteI don't think any of it is easy, but all of it is worth it, somehow, in the end.