Once every few years, I find a book that takes my breath away. And one of those came along for me, by fluke more than anything, recently. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss was sitting there amongst many others on its display table in a downtown bookstore. Something drew me to it: something made me buy it, and then reading it gave me moments of absolute elevation. I saw words brought together on a page in such a way that I’ve never seen before. I experienced a story that was so finely woven that I can only wonder at the finesse of the magical mind behind it. The clear recommendation is to go read it, revel in it, lap up every poetic line… but in the meantime, captured here is some of its splendor, out of context and thus not nearly full in its experience, but a taste nonetheless. (Slight spoiler alert)
“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend the rest of his life answering.”
“She said: Maybe I shouldn’t make up everything because that made it hard to believe anything.”
“Out of habit, I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren’t there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed.”
“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away.”
“To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.”
“The idea of evolution is so beautiful and sad. Since the earliest life on earth, there have been somewhere between five and fifty billion species, only five to fifty million of which are alive today. So, ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.”
“Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.”
“Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.”
“The fact that you got a little happier today doesn’t change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you’re the happiest and the saddest you’ve ever been in your whole life.”
“What about you? Are you the happiest and saddest right now that you’ve ever been?” “Of course I am. Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.”
“As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.”
“He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in any way original.”
“At the end, all that’s left of you is your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.”
“(If you don’t know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?)”
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