So Much Is Lost

 When you’re reading a used book and the previous owner has marked the most bland, unremarkable passage in the whole book.  Through what lens were they reading this book?

 

Though our house is small, our bedroom is large and features windows roughly on the east, south, and west.  On sunny afternoons the space is flooded in sunlight.  We call it The Solarium. Last night I awakened to a bright light coming through the eastern windows.  I realized the trees were lit up by a full moon.  The moon then moved to the south and poured its light through the shore pines outside those windows.  Finally, it shifted to the west and came through the window there unfiltered by trees, illuminating the room in a shadowy bluish light.  Then it dropped behind the house across the street and into the Pacific.

 

Noted by me in Outline: “So much is lost in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments and if you don’t hold on to them, the seas will take them, too.” ~ Rachel Cusk

 

Woman: “Are you feeling okay?  Your face looks puffy.”

Man looks in mirror: “I’m fine.  My hair just looks stupid.”

 

Tsumnami warning!  Stay away from the beach!  Every electronic device in the house is alerting us.  The first wave will hit us at 8:30. Naturally, at 8:30 we walk to the beach. Others are there, too. We wish, I suppose, to meet our fate head on.  No evidence of the tsunami appears.  We spectators are disappointed.

 

I collect agates on the shore.  I pick up even the small ones, small as baby’s teeth. The other day I absent-mindedly found one in my pocket and popped it in my mouth. I realized what I had 

done before I broke a tooth or swallowed. What the hell?

 

On the beach we are approached by a woman and a child with three dogs.  The dogs are a large  Golden Retriever, leashed to the woman, and a mini-Aussie Shepherd and a retriever puppy leased to the child.  The woman says: “The little one’s neurotic.” When we walked away my wife said, “At first I thought she was talking about the kid.”

 

When my wife can’t sleep she turns on a TED talk. In the middle of the night I write down this phrase: “escalation of commitment to a losing course of action.”  In the morning I wonder if this is comment on writing.  Specifically: mine.

 

Thrift store find: The Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa. This book has little drawings marking the passage of its previous reader: little half moons, stars, flowers.  An occasional poem is festooned with underlinings.  Finally, a note: “Consciousness is a problem.” They got that one right.