Tonight I sat in my nearly empty old apartment, waiting for my clothes as they rumbled in the laundry room. I didn’t know it at the time, but this voice was what told me to leave, that it was fine to leave, that I’d be fine and had nothing to fear or worry about.
Sometimes the most broken thing reminds us that everything else is mostly broken too, and that there’s nothing wrong with any of that.
Maybe I’ll get this tattooed on an arm after the Emily Dickinson poem:
Creo quia absurdum.
Sometimes you’ll read an interview with a Pulitzer Prize Winning novelist and you’ll know that you’re looking for gems, for tokens of wisdom that sparkle at the corners of their words like so many paltry trinkets a simple thief would be attracted to, as if these things were strategically placed there, jangling about the hip, to detract from the real golden watch in the left breast pocket or the ornate heirloom locket tucked safely in a bodice. Marilynne Robinson managed to dispense with the pleasant costume jewelry at one point during her recent interview for The Paris Review, giving a brief glimpse of her riches:
“The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: Stop doing this to yourselves.”
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