"Many die too late, and some die too early. The doctrine still sounds strange: 'Die at the right time!'
To be sure, how could the person who never lives at the right time ever die at the right time?"
On Free DeathKitabı okuyor
And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.
Sayfa 3Kitabı okudu
Very early in my life it was too late.
It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked.
Many of the new ideas were really old, discarded, discredited ideas that came back because we wanted or needed them or were more able to hear the people who had never forgotten them.
Sayfa 5Kitabı okudu
It’s never too late to pursue a dream.
Sayfa 18Kitabı okudu
To a Passer-By
The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;
Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.
A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?
Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!
“Every child deserves love, Asa. I’m sorry you were never given that. For that, I forgive you. We both do.”
Brady sits next to me at the lunch table and he brings a lunchbox every day. One time his mom packed him a piece of coconut cake. He doesn’t like coconut cake, so he told me I could have it. It was so good. I went home and told my mom how good it was, but she still hasn’t bought me coconut cake.
Sometimes Brady’s mom writes notes and puts them inside of his lunchbox. He reads them all to us and he laughs because he thinks they’re dumb. I never laugh, though. I don’t think the notes are dumb.
One time I saw one of the notes he threw in the trash and I picked it up.
It said, “Dear Brady. I love you! Have a great day at school!”
I tore the top of the note off that had Brady’s name on it and I kept it. I pretended my mother wrote it for me and sometimes I would read it. But that was a long time ago and I lost the note recently. That’s why I wanted to go to school today because if Brady had another note from his mom, I wanted to steal it and pretend it was for me again.
I wonder how it would feel to have someone say those words to me.
I love you!
No one has ever said that to me.
No one should have to experience a life never feeling truly cared for— not even by the parents who created them.
His eyes follow the tear down my cheek and then he lifts a hand to my face and wipes it away.
Of all the tears I’ve cried to Asa, he’s never once attempted to wipe them away.
I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan.
When I first wrote this book, I was going to use these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letters as an epigraph: “If a woman ignores these wrongs, then may women as a sex continue to suffer them; there is no help for any of us—let us be dumb and die.” I changed my mind, because I decided that no woman deserved what pornography does to women: no woman, however stupid or evil, treacherous or cowardly, venal or corrupt; no woman. I also decided that even if some women did, I didn’t. I also remembered the brave women, the women who had survived, escaped; in the late 1970s, they were still silent, but I had heard them. I don’t want them, ever, to be dumb and die; and certainly not because some other woman somewhere is a coward or a fool or a cynic or a Kapo. There are women who will defend pornography, who don’t give a damn. There are women who will use pornography, including on other women. There are women who will work for pornographers—not as so-called models but as managers, lawyers, publicists, and paid writers of “opinion” and “journalism.” There are women of every kind, all the time; there are always women who will ignore egregious wrongs. My aspirations for dignity and equality do not hinge on perfection in myself or in any other woman; only on the humanity we share, fragile as that appears to be. I understand Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s desperation and the rage behind it, but I’m removing her curse. No woman’s betrayal will make us dumb and dead—no more and never again. Beaver’s endured too much to turn back now.
Late one evening I was on the cancer floor in
a hospital, seeing a patient. There, I spoke
with a nurse who was devastated because she
had just lost a patient. "This is the sixth person I watched die this week!" she complained.
"I can't take it anymore, I can't watch loss
after loss after loss after loss. It feels
