Finished with love? my heart murmured.
Astrud Gilberto singing “Fly Me To the Moon” makes me think of “All Summer in a Day,” convinces me that I got into the sun for an hour, once, and the greed of wanting more than that.
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt
Elaine Scarry: “Physical pain, then, is an intentional state without an intentional object... if the sun is too bright for a woman’s eyes, she moves into the shade, and as she does, her eyes again fill with seeable objects rather than aversive sensation... the less there is an object for the state and only the state itself, the more it will approach the condition of pain.” I remember reading that and thinking, okay, but what about pleasure? A naive question, especially from someone who never found pleasure in the world anyhow, who was always turning away from it, forgetting it, forswearing it. Who lacked patience to see the other souls there.
Fitti nel limo dicon: “Tristi fummo
ne l’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra,
portando dentro accidïoso fummo:
or ci attristiam ne la belletta negra.”
“Der Gedanke an den Selbstmord ist ein starkes Trostmittel,” writes Fritz in Beyond Good and Evil; “mit ihm kommt man gut über manche böse Nacht hinweg.” Just so. Patchy old security blanket, clutched at whenever things got bad, worried over, wept into, worn through. And now no longer available, for political reasons; because there’s a whole whispering gallery who’d love the chance to say, we knew this thing was never going to work out, who’d love me as a statistic to immiserate others. No one wants to hear that it would have been worth it even so. For an hour in the sun.
