Essere parte di un libro magnifico

Quelle che vorrei condividere con voi oggi sono un paio di riflessioni, la prima sulla morte e la seconda sulla vita, incluse in un saggio della bravissima (e davvero bellissima) poetessa newyorkese Meghan O'Rourke intitolato The long goodbye, che Meghan scrisse in seguito alla scomparsa della madre.


1.

Without death our lives would lose their shape: “Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Or as a character in Don DeLillo’s White Noise says, “I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need?” It’s not clear that DeLillo means us to agree, but I think I do. 

I love the world more because it is transient.

2.

I’d had an intuition like this once before, as a child in Vermont. I was walking from the house to open the gate to the driveway. It was fall. As I put my hand on the gate, the world went ablaze, as bright as the autumn leaves, and I lifted out of myself and understood that I was part of a magnificent book. [...]

I stood there with a kind of peace humming in my blood.