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.
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