She found it difficult, this thing of being alone, awaiting the arrival of a group. She prepared a face - as her favourite poet had it - to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact, when she was not in company it didn't seem to her that she had a face at all... And yet in college, she knew she was famed for being opinionated, a 'personality' - the truth was she didn't take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn't feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescued Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. It was either only Zora who experienced this odd impersonality or it was everybody, and they were all play-acting, as she was. She presumed that this was the revelation college would bring her, at some point. In the meantime, waiting like this, waiting to be come upon by real people, she felt herself to be light, existentially light, and nervously rumbled through possible topics of conversation, a ragbag of weighty ideas she carried around in her brain to lend herself the appearance of substance. Read more »
Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.
All my life, I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role--grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving privileged information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. Why, I find myself silently asking my confiders, are you telling me? Of course I know why, really. They tell me because they regard me as safe. Sheba, Bangs, all of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest--with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not--never has been--a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.
Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beadnig their mouths. You make out to-do lists--reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself--slices of ice cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.Read more »
Don't you love my idealism? My hypocrisy? My willingness to sound as loving and naive as possible? At least I know that I don't know anything at all. I can admit it. Can you? Can you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and admit that you are no different from every other bundle of bones on this planet? And maybe the only things that make you different are your hands, the way you touch things, and what happens to them.
Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
