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Wednesday, September 12, 2018

The Void

I disentangled myself from memories that were now growing tight and thick, as if threading my way out of a forest dense with vegetation. Weary thoughts lay down and rested, but my body continued to move through a boundless void, an empty silence. In the air no birds circled and in the water no fish swam and on the earth nothing grew.
--The Seventh Day, Yu Hua

Sometimes a book, a good book, will venture outside the bounds of its story and admix, somehow, with one's own story--a coincidence of thought outside of time and place, outside its own fabric, its own point of reference. So it happens that the paragraph quoted above speaks to me of the strange world of unsettling reminiscence, of futile yearning that has lately lurked behind sleepless hours and tugged at my sleeve all hours of the day. I think back on things that were good, and how those good things got away from us. And I wonder how we allowed this to happen; how we, sailing away, watched the safe shores recede and somehow acquiesced. What were we thinking? Only now am I able to clearly say Stop--many years on toward the horizon. My thoughts are fixed on events that are fixed, relentlessly kneading them as if they might even now be nudged and reshaped, reconstituted, reformed. But in the air no birds circle, and in the water no fish swim, and on this earth nothing grows, for this earth itself, this soil of memory, is fallow, a grave. So much of the miraculous that we receive in life we also cast away, and to this the old man, and the woman of old, apply the plaintive silence of memory, the void that was left when their world moved on without them. I speak of things that are now unspeakable, I speak of things that can never be told, I speak of things that happened decades ago. Long hours have I spent in struggle with ghosts, long hours traversed a haunted terrain; for these things upon which my mind is set are figures that cast no shadows of their own, for they are shadows of the enduring shadows in my mind, and I know not how to put them to rest. 

Here there roamed everywhere the figures of those who had no graves. 

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