Lines I like

Lines from ‘The Sea’ by John Bahnville.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

How the mind wanders, even on most concentrated of occasions.

The carpeted corridor absorbed our footsteps.

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will blutting its blunt head against the world’s wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part if my energies was always given over to the simplest search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness.

Before I saw myself as a buccaneer, facing all comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of wormby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings.

Atlast, the elements have achieved a pitch of magnificence to match my inner turmoil.

Lines from ‘Year of Wonders’ by Geraldine Brooks.

God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother’s heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.

And yet how could anyone understand such things: that delicacy masked a most unnatural coldness; that subtle thought had twisted itself into perversion.

How little we know, I thought of people we live amongst.