Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix
out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the
clearer light of our own day."
"Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more
than a woman of sand, left by a careless child to near the water."
"There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia, freedom to and freedom from.
In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to.
Now you are being given freedom from.
Don't underrate it."
Since the paper famine there have been no newspapers...At the corner is the store known as
Soul Scrolls...Behind the shatter-proof window are print-out machines...they are known as
Holy Rollers. They print prayers, roll upon roll, prayers going out endlessly...There are five
different prayers...You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then punch in your own
number so your account will be debited, and punch in the number of times you want the
prayer repeated. The machines talk as they print out the prayers...Once the prayers have been
printed out and said, the paper rolls back through another slot and is recycled into fresh
paper again."
"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him.
We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and
yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we
reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult
it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We
were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh."
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is
hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and
you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled
with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing
to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it,
at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this."
"We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?"
"I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to
be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do,
how other saw me. I want to steal something."
Thursday, January 4th, Book Discussion at 10 AM.
Read. Contemplate. Discuss. Question. Understand.