Finished Tale of the Rose. It takes 2 to make a painful marriage. You can say 1 partner doesn’t appreciate you and treats you badly, but if you’re still in the relationship and taking it, well, it takes two to tango. So somewhere, both people are getting what they want. And that’s all I want to say right now about it.
Here are the passages I noted:
*”You’re going to live an intense life, he said to Tonio. “Don’t let jealous people get to you, always keep moving ahead.” And he confided to me, “He’s a great fellow: make him write, and people will talk about the two of you.”
*”I’m writing a book right now, just some personal experiences,” Tonio said. “I’m not a professional writer. I can’t write about anything I haven’t experienced. The whole of my being has to be involved in order for me to express myself–or, I’d even say, in order for me to grant myself the right to think.”
*I sensed that Tonio was suffering for all mankind, that in some way he wanted to make them better. He was a man who chose his own destiny, but he had to pay a high price for his freedom, and he knew it…Not one spare second was granted him, for something almost divine had made him a kind of seed, destined to sow a better race of men on the earth. He had to be helped in his struggles, in the painful process of giving birth to himself and to his books, amid all the everyday cares that harried him and among all those who had not yet perceived that something in his heart was speaking with God.
*I observed my husband the way one watches a great tree grow, without ever being conscious of its transformation. I touched him as if I were touching a tree in his garden, a tree whose shadow I would have liked, much later, to fall into my final sleep. I was used to my tree’s miracles. His detachment from material things had almost become natural to me. And we lived in expectation of discovering a better world that would not be unattainable.
*A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.
*”But don’t forget what I’m going to say to you: the most terrible dramas are those veiled in mystery.”
*I stroked the lovely evening gown I would wear for this, the first evening when I had given myself the right to live again as a woman awaiting a sign, which could come from anywhere, that everything would come alive once more.
*”You will forget me,” said the captain, “as all my passengers have forgotten me. That’s as it should be. I’ve loved them all, all the woman who stayed close to me for an entire voyage, lying on the same deck chair, full of the drama of their lives, full of their fear of dying. They were all as beautiful and as fragile as my boat’s journeys or the life of flowers and butterflies that live only a day, like the glass of champagne you’re holding in your hand that will soon be empty but will live on in the bright glow of your eyes.”
*I believe Vera finally understood then that just being pretty isn’t enough for a woman to become and remain part of a man’s life.
*My God, being the wife of a pilot is a whole career, but being the wife of a writer is a religious vocation!
*His way of seeing the world, of experiencing it, had undoubtedly come to him from his childhood. He never referred to himself, never talked about himself. He tried every day to grow, to use past experiences to increase the likelihood of success, not only for himself but for others. He didn’t talk just to make noise with words or spew out hot air; he always said something that had meaning. He never allowed his physical and emotional suffering to interfere with the rest of his life; he put them completely out of his mind. He always gave himself over entirely to whoever was listening to him. I remember a line of his: “You must love others but without telling them so.” It explains his character: he loved people but wasted no time explaining the attention and love he was capable of giving them.
For him, love was a natural thing. Those who lived with him found him hard to bear because when he left he took the whole of his being away with him, completely and utterly. But he was also capable of returning completely and utterly, without living a particle of himself anywhere else. His physical and psychological strengths were united, in harmony with each other, and almost inexhaustible. When I would scold him because he was working himself to exhaustion on mathematical equations that seemed alien and forbidding to me, he would answer with a huge laugh and then invariably say, “I won’t be wearing myself out any longer when I’m dead.”
I loved him for his clumsiness, his poetic appearance, the way he had of looking like a giant who is concealing a sensitive soul. He knew how to move very heavy weights effortlessly, with the same grace he employed in cutting little airplanes out of lightweight white paper, airplanes he would then launch into the sky from our balcony over the neighboring houses…
(this last one struck home for me. “you must love others without telling them so.” or by hiding them. my deepest feelings are the ones i don’t ever talk about)
