[b]Jonathan Safran Foer
You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.[/b]
That can’t be good.
Grief and loss are probably the most fearful creatures that exist. But loss shouldn’t be a fearful creature. It should be a creature of wisdom. It should teach us not to fear that tomorrow may never come, but live fully, as though the hours are melting away like seconds. Loss should teach us to cherish those we love, to never do anything that will result in regret, and to cheer on tomorrow with all of its promises of greatness. It’s easy and un-extraordinary to be frightened of life. It’s far more difficult to arm yourself with the good stuff despite all the bad and step foot into tomorrow as an everyday warrior.
On the other hand, you can overthink these things.
This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
And he sure as shit didn’t eat bugs.
That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.
You know, when it actually is there.
Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do…
Wow, that sure takes me back some.
Only a few months into our marriage, writes the grandfather, we started marking off areas in the apartment as ‘Nothing Places,’ in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist.
Clearly, we need something like that here, don’t we?