theparisreview:“Our lives move deeper and slower—as if they are taking on weight. It’s good weight,
theparisreview:“Our lives move deeper and slower—as if they are taking on weight. It’s good weight, most of it, but it alarms us, I think, at the way it feels like that added weight tries to sink us. I think it alarms Martha a lot.“It’s like sinking through snow up to your ankles, or deeper. It’s like not being sure, one day, that the ice will hold you—when every day before, it has. It may be my imagination, but it seems like Martha doesn’t want to talk about this—that this accrual of weight is happening. As if she believes that any day now—tomorrow, for instance—things will begin to get lighter and freer again—even if she would admit to this weight-gathering occurring in the first place.“I know she can feel it. She says all things are cyclic, and they are, but this thing—us—is somehow different.“The things outside of us seem never to change, beyond the constancy of the four season—birth, life, death, rebirth—but I’m convinced that our lives are different, just a bit above or below these constant cycles. As if we are on some march through the woods toward those final cycles, toward some final, newer place.“But Martha won’t hear any of this kind of talk. She says it’s all the same. She says nothing’s changing. And still: depsite the endlessness of the days, and the seeming strength of our continuity, there are fractures and gaps, where whole chunks of time will fall away—as if calving away from the whole, too weak to stay fastened to the core. Things that were assumed to be lock-solid, rock-sure, fall away, leaving only loss, emtpiness and confusion.“And we start anew.”—Rick Bass, from “Two Deer”Art Credit Jarek Puczel -- source link