Still reading Sheila Heti’s Pale Colour (yay me!), and like I did with Part I, it’s time to share some of my favorite quotes from Part II.
On death.
She lay beside him, holding him, her arm over his chest, her body pressed up against the side of his now-still and lifeless body, which had been breathing mere moments before, and she knew that her brain was a small and useless, earth-bound thing that would never understand, and that she would never be able to properly reconstruct what she had just experienced.
I underlined “earth-bound thing.” Something about that description of the brain is so compelling to me.
She didn’t know what to do with him in these dreams. She sensed that he was making a mistake, and feared that his second death would be worse than his first. She knew it was her responsibility to tell him he was dead, but would he believe her? Would he get mad? Her father, who refused to act like an adult in life—who had insisted his whole life that he was still a child—could never be told to act dead. He would have been appalled at her conventionality; that she wanted him to be like other humans, and die.
Heart-wrenching. Wry. Funny. We all die. How boring and utterly normal.
It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store in all that sunshine. It was the dead who needed to be held on to, so they would not slip away. Who would save the dead from oblivion, if not we, the living? She would have to hold on to her father forever so he would not slip away.
It reminds me of the Pixar film Coco. When one dies, those who remain, who were touched by the recently passed, carry a responsibility to tend to the embers of the deceased’s soul, to keep pumping in oxygen, so the fire keeps burning.
On books.
She saw how great art was, as she lay in his bed, and how faithful; how faithful a book was, and how strong, a place you could be safe, apart from the world, held inside a world that would never grow weak, and which could pass through wars, massacres and floods—could pass through all of human history, and the integrity of its soul would stay strong. A writer could suspend their soul in language, making the souls of writers like droplets of oil, suspended in the sea of life.
I’ve often called books my best friend. When I was smaller, I would surround my bed with books as a salve against loneliness. I know that sounds rather sad; maybe it is. Yet it was loneliness that led to my codependency with books, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
On the heart.
The last thing that’s needed is to judge your own heart, but then that’s the first thing you go and do. A heart ruses to judge itself. A heart should have better things to do. A heart doesn’t.
Heti’s book is perplexed and fascinated by the work of the critic. I think this passage relates to this. We ought to be kind to our hearts, yet often we aren’t, and we remain our own harshest critics. Perhaps the problem isn’t the criticism, but the harshness of it. Art critics that only degrade works of art aren’t good art critics. The synonyms of criticism are survey, review, assessment, etc. These aren’t intrinsically negative judgments. So rather than be our own worst critics, we ought to be our own best critics. It means instead of examining ourselves to humiliate and berate, we should examine ourselves with an eye for the truth — which is likely a mix of good and bad, but surely results in a kinder picture of ourselves than the picture generated through self-flagellation.
On websites.
She doesn’t know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial. Had it been wrong of her not to understand that the sky was more valuable than a website? People once valued the sky, but only because they had nothing better—because they didn’t have websites. It was hard to tell which was right: either the sky was more valuable than a website, or a website was more valuable than the sky. If she gathered together the amount of time she spent looking at websites, and the amount of time she spent looking at the sky, then her life was clearly answering which was the more valuable, for her.
Give me a second, have to go outside and stare at the sky.
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