something about the colour blue

- from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

- from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in Front of One’s Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.
She was a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. She learned impossibly difficult songs on her voilin, songs outside of what she thought she could know, and would each time come crying to Yankel, I have learned to play this one too! It’s so terrible! I must write something that not even I can play! She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast, They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I’m being honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists. She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.
Waiting for someone? Yankel asked.
What color is this?
He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red.
Yes, it is red, isn’t it?
Seems so.
She buried her head in her hands. But couldn’t it be just a bit more red?
Brod’s life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily…None of it moved her. She adressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don’t love you. Poem too long: I don’t love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don’t love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don’t love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.
If we were to open to a random page in her journal - which she must have kept and kept with her at all times, not fearing that it would be lost, or discovered and read, but that she would one day stumble upon that thing which was finally worth writing about and remembering, only to find that she had no place to write it - we would find some rendering of the following sentiment: I am not in love.
So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn’t care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

As the hum of crickets summoned the darkness, Brod remained on the float to watch the beginning of the festival without the pestering of men. The paraders and shtetl folk were already drunk - arms around one another, hands on one another, fingers probing, thighs accommodating, all thinking only of her. The strings were beginning to sag (birds landed, depressing the middles; winds blew, swinging them side to side like waves), and the princesses had run to the shore to see the gold and lean against the visiting men.
Mist came first, then rain, so slow that the drops could be followed as they fell. The men and women continued their groping dance as the klezmer bands poured their music through the streets. Young girls captured fireflies in cheesecloth nets. They peeled open the bulbs and painted their eyelids with the phosphorescence. Boys squashed ants between fingers, not knowing why.
The rain intensified, and paraders drank themselves sick on homemade vodka and beer. People made wild, urgent love in the dark corners where houses met and under the handing canopies of weeping willows. Couples cut their backs on the shells, twigs, and pebbles of the Brod’s shallow waters. They pulled at one another in the grass: brassy young men driven with lust, jaded women less wet than breath on glass, virgin boys moving like blind boys, widows lifting their veils, spreading their legs, pleading - to whom?
From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey though the darkness to the astronaut’s eyes.
In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - metropolises will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Shtetls will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples, invisible.
The glow is born from the sum of thousands of loves: newlyweds and teenagers who spark like lighters out of butane, pairs of men who burn fast and bright, pairs of women who illuminate for hours with soft multiple glows, orgies like rock and flint toys sold at festivals, couples trying unsuccessfully to have children who burn their frustrated image on the continent like the bloom a bright light leaves on the eye after you turn away from it.
Some nights, some places are a little brighter. It’s difficult to stare at New York City on Valentine’s Day, or Dublin on St. Patrick’s. The old walled city of Jerusalem lights up like a candle on each of Chanukah’s eight nights. Trachimday is the only time all year when the tiny village of Trachimbrod can be seen from space, when enough copulative voltage is generated to sex the Polish-Ukrainian skies electric. We’re here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We’re here, and we’re alive.

from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

So they strung their minutes like pearls on an hour-string. Neither slept. They stood vigil with their cheeks against the pine divide, passing notes through the hole like schoolchildren, passing vulgarities, blown kisses, blasphemous hollers and songs.

Weep not, my love,
Weep not, my love,
Your heart is close to me.
You fucking bitch,
Ungrateful cunt,
Your heart is close to me.
Oh, do not fear,
I’m nearer than near,
Your heart is close to me.
I’ll gouge out your eyes
And pound you in your fucking head,
You fucking bitch whore,
Your heart is close to me.

from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

“We could go in the morning.”
“No.”
“Perhaps it would be a good thing.”
“No,” he said. “My ghosts are not there.”
(You have ghosts?)
(Of course I have ghosts.)
(What are your ghosts like?)
(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)
(That is also where my ghosts reside.)
(You have ghosts?)
(Of course I have ghosts.)
(But you are a child.)
(I am not a child.)
(But you have not known love.)
(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Do you think I’m wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of the petrified maple.
No, he said.
Why?
Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it’s only noon. You couldn’t be something that hundreds of others are.
Are you saying that I am not-wonderful?
Yes, I am.
She fingered his dead arm. Do you think I am not-beautiful?
You are incredibly not-beautiful. You are the farthest possible thing from beautiful.

from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

THE DISGRACED USURER Yankel D took the baby girl home that evening. Here we go, he said, up the front step. Here we are. This is your door. And here, this is your doorknob that I am opening. And here, this is where we put the shoes when we come in. And here is where we hang the jackets. He spoke to her as if she could understand him, never in a high pitch or in monosyllables, and never in nonsense words. This is milk that I am feeding you. It comes from Mordechai the milkman, whom you will meet one day. He gets the milk from a cow, which is a very strange and troubling thing if you think about it, so don’t think about it.. This is my hand that is petting your face. Some people are left-handed and some are right-handed. We don’t know which you are yet, because you just sit there and let me do the handling… This is a kiss. It is what happens when lips are puckered and pressed against something, sometimes other lips, sometimes a cheek, sometimes something else. It depends.. This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.

from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer