Wretched Woman!

I've been thinking about this letter since I read it.

(source)
Jermain Wesley Loguen (Jarm Logue) fled his enslavement, regrettably leaving behind his mother and siblings.  His former owner's wife wrote him to tell him that they were encountering hard times and to ask him to pay her for his freedom as he was a thief who stole himself.  Not only this, but telling him that circumstances had led her to sell his siblings away.

His reply is what I have been thinking on these last few days.  For those of us who struggle to find the right words when confronted with a bully and/or a horrible situation, Rev. Loguen wrote with grace and authority, saying exactly what one wishes he would have.

Words

Words

from "The Face of the Horse" by Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky
"Then we should hear words.
Words as large as apples. Thick
as honey or buttermilk.
Words which penetrate like flame
And, once within the soul, like fire in some hut,
Illuminate its wretched trappings.
Words which do not die
And which we celebrate in song."

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, p. 238.
"She has always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent on emotions like sticks in water."

A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

p. 189 "Poor words, you do not suffice."

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

p. 231  "The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumors and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles."

 source

 

Perception

Atonement by Ian McEwan, p. 103.

"No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations."

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd, p. 124.

"How do you begin to transpose one experience into the 'normality' of another? How can you even expect those at home to understand? Should you even want them to? Why start pushing the damage you shoulder through choice onto the lives of those close to you at home?"

Cowardice

The Book Thief by Zusak

p. 115

"is there cowardice in the acknowledgement of fear? Is there cowardice in being glad that you lived?"

Blindfold and Alone by Corns and Hughes-Wilson

p. 48

"Fear, panic, terror- all go into the equation of 'cowardice'. It is perhaps the outcome that is the true arbiter of cowardice, such as refusing to obey the order to attack, or running away in fear. Cowardice is in fact the individual's reaction to his (very natural) fear, not the fear itself, despite its only too obvious manifestation. Fear is not cowardice."

The Dangers of Memory

When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen

p. 5

"Memory is one of life's burdens that we can do nothing about."

The Ministry of Pain by Ugresic

p. 210

"There is no such things as mercy, no such things as compassion; there is only forgetting; there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory."

The Dangers of Nostalgia

Dangers of Nostalgia

"Nostalgia" is so often said with that sort of simpering, "good ol' days", harkening back to the time when things were simple and clean and wonderful. They never tell you about the dangers of Nostalgia, the pain that blind-sides you, the hurt that hunts you down in your beautiful, mundane life and sticks a fork in your hand, heart or eye and says, "you think you control your memory but really your memory controls you." Maybe you should think of Nostalgia as a brother to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The way that the memory is triggered has to be similar; smell, sound, sight. Although some find a relief or a release in Nostalgia, there are others who find it like being mugged by their memory, their carefully constructed piece of mind stolen and them left bereft, shaking.

The Ministry of Pain- Ugresic

p. 226

"Words like 'phantom limb syndrom' or 'nostalgia' are arbitrary lexical labels meant to denote the complex emotional blow that comes of loss and the impossibility of return. They imply that it makes virtually no difference whether we make our peace with the loss or experience relief at being able to let go of the past or of the desire to return to it. Because the blow does not lose its intensity thereby. Nostalgia, if that's the word for it, is a brutal, insidious assailant who favours the ambush approach, who attacks when we least expect him and goes straight for the solar plexus. Nostalgia always wears a mask and, o irony of ironies, we are only its chance victim. Nostalgia makes its appearance in translation- most often a bad one- after a complicated journey not unlike the children's game 'telephone'. The phrase the first player whispers into the ear next to him passes through a whole chain of ears until it emerges from the mouth of the last player like a rabbit from a hat."

After the First World War

Writing Scotland: How Scotland’s Writers Shaped the Nation
author: Carl MacDougall
Polygon, Edinburgh, 2004

p. 96
The play [Peter Pan] was a huge success and has been adapted for various media many times, most familiarly in the Disney versions. But ten years after it was premiered, the generation who grew up with Peter’s cheery notion that ‘death is an awfully big adventure’ found [p. 97] themselves marching off to the battlefields of the First World War. Off-duty soldiers drew comfort from Never Land, a place of eternal childhood. The adventure of death- the greatest adventure of all- would have guaranteed eternal youth, a consolation many soldiers must have carried with them when they faced the guns.
The line was removed after the war.”

Slinkachu, "Scars", London
source

Integrations- Pablo Neruda

Integrations

After everything,
I will love you
As if it were always before


As if, after so much waiting,
Not seeing you
And you not coming,
You were breathing close to me forever.


Close to me with your habits,
With your colour and your guitar
Just as countries unite
In school room lectures,
And two regions become blurred
And there is a river near a river
And two volcanoes grow together.


Close to you is close to me
And your absence is far from everything
And the moon is the colour of clay
In the night of quaking earth
When, in terror of the earth,
All the roots join together
And silence is heard ringing
With the music of fright


Fear is also a street
And among its trembling stones
Tenderness somehow is able
To march with four feet
And four lips


Since without leaving the present
That is a fragile thing
We touch the sand of yesterday
And in the sea
Love reveals a repeated fury

-- Pablo Neruda