The Snow Queen

People are more than you think they are. And they’re less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

It's hardly ever the destination we've been anticipating, is it? Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing. Where did we - the species, that is - pick up that strange and perverse habit?

It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire.

The song is an unvarnished love shout, an implorement tinged with...anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosoher, the anger of a pot. An anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away, that we're being shown marvels but reminded always that they don't belong to us. They're sultans' treasures; we're lucky, we're expected to feel lucky to have been invited to see them at all.

You know, if you're hopeful, if you're even a little bit happy about something that might happen, it doesn't affect the outcome. You could still give yourself a period of optimism, even if it all falls apart.

Visions are answers. Answers imply questions. It

Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect.

We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as we can muster before we’re wrapped in our winding sheets, and returned.

She doesn't really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder into her eyes, no one marvelling at her.

He’ll be successful, finally, this coming Sunday, at the modest ceremony to be held in the living room. It’s all so clear. Tyler will write a beautiful, meaningful song. Barrett will find a love that abides, and work that matters. And Liz. Liz will tire of boys, tire of her resolution to grow into a tough, colorful old woman who lives defiantly alone.

Maybe – let’s not rule it out – this will be the song that cuts clean, the one that matters, the one that sheds standard-issue romance and reveals, under its old skin, a raw blood-red devotion deeper than comfort, a desire profounder than schoolboy satisfaction, a yearning cold and immaculate and unstoppable as snow.

And maybe – maybe – love will arrive, and remain.

Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there's affection and there's sex but there's no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no binding, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily self-administered. What would it be like, Barrett wonders, to be the other, the man who's had the modest portion he thinks of as enough, who slips away before the mess sets in, before he's available to accusation and recrimination, before the authorities start demanding of him When, and Why, and With Whom

Here's the sting of livingness. He's back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he's renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people who burn and want, who remember everything, who walk lucid and unafraid.

If you live in certain places, in a certain way, you'd better learn to praise the small felicities.

Isn’t the universe full of gaseous elements?” Andrew says, “Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.

Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing.

She'll be willing to meet someone who can hold her interest for more than a few months, and that guy will teach her about domestic deepenings, the modest reliable thrill of the familiar, which as almost everyone but Liz knows has been the way of human happiness since humanity was born.

God save us from people who think they're smarter than they actually are.

Women are kind of screwed, in the world,” Andrew says.

Heaven winked at you, right? Maybe. Maybe it did. Or maybe it was just an airplane and a cloud. But if heaven winks at anybody, it's probably the less-than-conspicious seekers; the ones who choose the path over the avenue, the gap in the hedge over the trumpeted gates. That's probably why there's no verifiable evidence, right? The universe only winks at the ones no one will believe.

Something like anger, but the anger of a philosopher, the anger of a poet, an anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away; that we're being shown marvels but reminded, always, that they don't belong to us, they're sultan's treasures, we're lucky (we're expected to feel lucky) to have been invited to see them at all.

He hadn't remotely imagined that one morning he'd check his text messages and find love to have been lost, with approximately the degree of remorse one would feel over the loss of a pair of sunglasses.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

It's remarkable, being alive. Being, once again, someone walking through a dust of blowing snow, passing the window of the liquor store, which offers an array of bottles surrounded by tiny blinking lights,; seeing her own reflection skim across the glass; being, once again, able to recieve the ordinary pleasures, boots on the pavement, hands in the pockets of her jacket...