Wow. On Sunday I finished Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay: a Memoir. It’s her account of dealing with “a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time.” Such a powerful book. Her writing style (first person, story told through brief paragraphs which function as fragments of ideas) is so compelling that I read the entire thing even though it was all about illness and her body falling apart. This is saying a lot because I don’t like thinking/reading about prolonged illness and the body falling apart; it reminds me too much of my mom’s 4 years of slowly dying from pancreatic cancer.
I could spend all day (and then some) writing about the different ways that I was moved/provoked/inspired by Manguso’s book, but I don’t have time. So here are a few passages that I want to ruminate on:
Nothing happens in an instant. Nothing starts happening and nothing finishes happening. History doesn’t begin anywhere and it doesn’t end.
Sarah Manguso, 182
Nothing happens in a moment. Nothing happens quickly. If you think something happened quickly, you’re looking at only part of it.
Sarah Manguso, 182
But to pay attention is to love everything.
To see the future as brightness.
Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see things only as their own fatal brightness, and there is nothing after that brightness.
You can’t learn from remembering. You can’t learn from guessing.
You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness, into brightness.
Sarah Manguso, 184