Intimacies

It's been a while since I read a book where I noted down many quotations. It's not really the style of writing that captivated me, but the content of the observations. I...liked/enjoyed reading Intimacies, but it gave me feelings of fracture and unsettledness, and a few parts that hit too close to home haha. But a book (or other piece of art) that makes one feel something is good. 

You're married, I said.

Yes, he said at once. But I don't know for how much longer. Is that okay?

The words themselves were simple to the point of being blunt, but they were also words that did not try to deflect or avoid. I could have walked away then, and chosen not to involve myself any further. But I was disarmed by his honesty, by the simple question that was so difficult to answer. The appearance of simplicity is not the same thing as simplicity itself, even then I was aware of this. As if conscious of my hesitation, he took my hand and brought it to his lips and kissed the palm and fingers. I shivered at the touch of his mouth on my skin. He opened the door to the car and I got in.

For that reason, the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze.

It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography.

My older son loved the movie, I think he has a crush on the actress, she's very beautiful. I asked how old her children were and she said, Ten and twelve. It's gone quickly, their childhood, but it's also gone very slowly. When they are young, it is exhausting and you have no time for yourself, but you can still make them happy. That's no longer the case with my boys. They're old enough to understand things, they see the world as it is. They are wiser but they are also more vulnerable.