when Shelley and you and I ran away? Inside were the few scraps of paper from the graveyard, the ones he’d dropped in the bushes or the grass. I never knew if he’d left them on purpose. “Clerval who’s left for the east” one said, and then there were these: “unable to endure the aspect of the being he’d created” / “inside his laboratory” / “oppressed by a slow fever” / “dejection never leaves him” / “that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing at my feet” / “this trait of kindness moved me.”
And a few more:
“my life was indeed hateful to me” / “to seek one who fled from me” / “vast and irregular planes of ice which had no end”
The handwriting was large, dark, crude, as if written with a branch or twig.
Some nights I’d lie awake imagining a plague covering the earth, and I’d wonder why I couldn’t stand the thought that he and I might be the last ones alive—why didn’t I want to be left with him?—even though when I listened to him read, a comfort fierce as burning sand came into me.
Was I reading to myself or her? After a while I couldn’t tell the difference, though I recoiled when I thought of the human world she was part of that world that had recoiled from me.
If human contact had come to seem a form of contamination, and it had, and myself ugly in my own eyes when I considered what I’d glimpsed in yours, then the contamination I felt from books was less a disease than a blending of minds, conversations unfolding across centuries, weird impersonal probings, wonderings passed from one being to another, facts and syntactical combinations taking root in one being then another.
Over time I thought of you less, though I still feared I might hurt the child who, though motherless, must certainly have been beloved. She sat there sorting pebbles as I read:
“Man has been changed into an artificial monster, his faculties benumbed.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“There are authors whose object is to narrate real events. Mine, if I should be able to attain it, would be to tell of what is possible to happen.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear.
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The Beggar’s Rags, fluttering in Air,
Does to Rags the Heavens tear.
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet Delight.
Some are born to sweet Delight,
Some are born to endless Night.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“Ivy grows best when wild; birds wing most sweetly without teaching.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“Be very careful, in painting, to observe that among the shadows there are other shadows that are almost imperceptible as to darkness and shape.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“Now I will tell you about the city of Kinsay. It has some thirty thousand baths, the water of which is supplied by fresh springs. They are the finest and largest hot baths in the world; large enough for one hundred persons to bathe together. The people delight in them. In that city there are also ten principal markets. Some contain pears weighing as much as ten pounds apiece, their pulp white and fragrant as a confection. And there are peaches in their season both yellow and white, of very delicate flavors. The natives are peaceful in character. They know nothing of handling arms and keep none in their houses. Every year they produce enormous quantities of salt which bring in a great revenue; also great quantities of sugar and silk. The trading of these keeps them in comfort. But now we will quit this place and speak of other cities …”
Claire,
I kept imagining that he and I were the only ones left alive. His gravelly voice a spider’s web which instead of viciously entrapping created against the air a refuge of intersecting lines, a kind of dwelling. I lived within that voice, its stories. And still I couldn’t stand the thought of being left with him. Sometimes I imagined hurting him, seeing him cry. Why does the mind disfigure itself why does it… Imagined telling him I hated his voice, his yellow eyes, that he was a disgusting aberration of nature, nothing anyone could ever love. I’d picture his shoulders heaving as he sobbed. Imagined throwing a stick at him or stones. For a while this comforted me. But why would the thought of