The last word, our series about emotions and states of mind in books, focuses on depictions of happiness this month, from Austen’s Persuasion to a 21st-century sonnetWordsworth was surprised by it. For Anaïs Nin, it was ever out of reach. As she wrote …
The last word, our series about emotions and states of mind in books, focuses on depictions of happiness this month, from Austen’s Persuasion to a 21st-century sonnet
Wordsworth was surprised by it. For Anaïs Nin, it was ever out of reach. As she wrote in a 1939 diary entry:
Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window.
And what he saw then he never saw again. He was particularly moved by the sight of children going to school, blue-grey pigeons swooping down to the pavement from a roof, and rolls dusted with flour being put out by an unseen hand. These rolls, the pigeons, and the two boys were ethereal creatures. All of this happened at the same time: a boy ran towards a pigeon and glanced up at Levin with a smile; the pigeon beat its wings, and flew off, sparkling in the sun, amidst particles of snow shimmering in the air, while from a window came the smell of freshly baked bread, and rolls were put out… Levin started laughing and crying with happiness.
I think we will not open the door or follow him. I think that just now we are not wanted there. I think it will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away. At the end of the field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and the harebells and Gipsy roses and St John’s Wort, we may just take one last look, over our shoulders, at the white house where neither we nor anyone else is wanted now.
If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
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