The Autobiography of My Mother

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.

Observing any human being from infancy, seeing someone come into existence, like a new flower in bud, each petal first tightly furled around another, and then the natural loosening and unfurling, the opening into a bloom, the life of that bloom, must be something wonderful to behold; to see experience collect in the eyes, around the corners of the mouth, the weighing down of the brow, the heaviness in heart and soul, the thick gathering around the waist, the breasts, the slowing down of footsteps not from old age but only with the caution of life-all this is something so wonderful to observe, so wonderful to behold; the pleasure for the observer, the beholder, is an invisible current between the two, observed and observer, beheld and beholder, and I believe that no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways a definition of love.

Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.

There is a certain way that life ought to be, an ideal way, a perfect way, and there is the way that life is, not quite the opposite of ideal, not quite the opposite of perfect, it just is not quite the way it should be but not quite the way it should not be either; I mean to say that in any situation, only one or two, maybe even three out of ten, things are just what you have been praying for.

My father could not love, but he believed he could, and that must be enough, because perhaps half the world feels that way. He believed he loved me, but I could tell him how untrue that was, I could list for him the number of times he had placed me squarely within the jaws of death; I could list for him the number of times he had failed to be a father to me, his motherless child, while on his way to becoming a man of this world. He loved, he loved; he loved himself. It is perhaps the way of all men.

That “these people” were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me.

Death is the only reality, for it is the only certainty, inevitable to all things.