The Truest Thing I Read Today, March 18, 2014

There was no formal memorial service. David wouldn't have wanted one. But a few of his closest friends gathered other friends at a house near the Mall, and Sara went, and took Jason. There were lots of beautiful women, women she'd never met, and several of them seemed mildly drunk and very upset. Sara asked Jason's godfather, "Are these all the lovers?"

And he had said, "At Brecht's funeral, there were many mistresses, but everyone knew who the great love was."

"How?"

"She was the only one who wasn't crying."

"Thank you," said Sara, as if his anointment meant anything.

-- Lea Carpenter, Eleven Days

The Best Thing I Read Today, March 17, 2014

Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he's going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can't stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it's easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn't this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?

-- Chang Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea