I heard the sea and asked, / "What language is that?"
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I just started reading Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, one of those books I only came across because I was in a bookstore2, and the cover caught my eye, and then the back included blurbs by at least three people whose work I know and appreciate, and then I flipped to a random page and encountered this sentence:
The last place I expected to confront the pain of the end of my marriage was in video games3
And lo, sold.
Another of Villarreal’s sentences, which I read on the subway back home and felt deep in my chest:
Navigating a silence is difference from being kept from a secret. One is a ghost, the other is a locked door.
(The one that follows is also a banger.)
Which got me thinking about silence and secrets and ghosts and locked doors. In truth, perhaps I am always thinking about ghosts and locked doors.
If you are into ghosts and tolerate some gore, might I also recommend Dead Boy Detectives. It is about a 6 on the Gaiman gore scale, whereas That Scene in the Diner in The Sandman is at 104.
And here is an essay by Colin Dickey about ghosts and grief and pop culture and the pandemic, which I first found via Perfect Sentences5:
You cannot tell a narrative of those years—of these years—as a single story, as a personal narrative of an individual. Our lives have always been intertwined, but “how to live?” is no longer a question that one can answer solely for oneself.
Attribution
I heard the sea and asked, "What language is that?" The sea replied, "The language of eternal questions." I saw the sky and asked, "What holds the answer?" The sky replied, "The language of eternal silence." — The Answer by Rabindranath Tagore
Not hosted on Substack, in case you — like me — consider these things
The Barnes & Noble on 82nd & Broadway in NYC
I am currently torturing myself trying to complete 100% of Elden Ring before June 21. A significant amount of swearing is involved.
The Audible adaptation version of this scene is an 11.
The selection: “Expect a language that allows us to see grief as a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one's eye, there and beckoning, waiting for us to be ready.”