Friday, July 22, 2005

Words to love by

"I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don't expect to be happy. I don't imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don't think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.

But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love - all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am."

- Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

My apologies for the soppiness - hangover from evening spent drowning in Winterson (which is the only way you can read her - see review of the novel on Considerable Speck) followed by two and a half hours of Tristan und Isolde. Like taking an emotional sauna, only with all your clothes (thoughts) still on.

2 comments:

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Anonymous said...

So, I never knew [and this is my ignorance] that Winterson was a famous writer. Or that anyone else but me had ever heard of her. So when I read your post... I was surprised. Someone knows my secret love. I picked up her book "The World and Other Places" on a whim and fell in love with it. It was at one of those book sales.. at Strand in Bangalore.

Do you also know "The Patchwork Planet"? I'm hoping for my own sake, not.