This intelligence must have lain deep within me, for it lingered in spite of the many years I spent merely keeping house for you. My mother was always very troubled by my intelligence; for a woman it’s an affliction.
A bitter remark is the consolation of the inept; I forgive all your remarks.
Just the opposite: neglect is like ashes, ashes that keep the fire hidden within but do not let the warmth die out. When self-respect ebbs, a lack of attention does not seem unjust. So it causes no pain. And that’s why women are ashamed to experience grief. So I say: if this be your arrangement, that women will suffer, then it is best to keep them in neglect, as far as possible; with attention and love, suffering only grows worse.
What is our life that we must fear death? Those whose life-bonds have been knotted tight with love and care, they flinch before death.
There’s one thing to be said for growing up neglected and uncared for: it makes the body ageless, immortal. Disease doesn’t want to linger, so the easy roads to death are shut off. The illness mocked her and left; nothing at all happened. But this much was made clear: it is most difficult to give shelter to the world’s most wretched. Whoever needs greatest shelter also faces the greatest obstacles to gaining it.
I asked the Lord, Why is it that whatever is the most insignificant obstacle in this world is also the hardest to surmount?
How trivial this daily life’s journey; how trivial all its fixed rules, its fixed ways, its fixed phrases of rote, all its fixed defeats.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Just a mistake
When your small mistakes make you feel miserable and helpless for over a long period of time you come to understand the delicacy of life. Your efforts to pacify yourself go in vain.
After some time you even think that you have forgiven yourself but the remnants still remain and the affects are subliminal.
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