Tag: Marriage

Beauty — finding it, making it…

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But like all utopian visions, theirs had its contradictions. They’d sold all their belongings to build a boat. They were abandoning everyone they knew to live afloat, alone, unshackled from obligation and community, from all the things that bind a person to a place or its people, from the day-to-day indignities of ordinary life and the unseen rules whose weight perhaps you feel only in the place you were raised. After all, what is more self-interested than running away?

— Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead Books, July 8, 2025)

Notes:

  • One of the best books I have ever read. Highly recommended.
  • NY Times Book Review: “Stranded at Sea, Would Their Marriage Survive? A Marriage at Sea” tells the stranger-than-fiction story of one couple who traded their lives for the ocean — and almost lost them.”
    • “Beauty — finding it, making it — has always been an act of defiance against despair. In Elmhirst’s delicate, humane depiction of the couple, her choice of narrative framing, her pacing and her compassion, she renders “A Marriage at Sea” an act of beauty in its own right. I found myself, alternately, holding my breath as I read at top speed, wandering rooms in search of someone to read aloud to, and placing the book facedown, arrested by quiet statements that left me reeling with their depth.” — Blair Braverman.
  • Sophie Elmhirst official website.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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But I also knew that the most intimate relationship is not mutual. It is one-way: the mother’s relationship to the child. The best part of my life had been this animal intimacy, the secretion of my milk into this body, the teaching how to lift food to the mouth, how to speak, how to show love according to the feeling of love, how to put on a shoe, how to pick up a spoon, how to wipe one’s own tears, how to piss and shit and be clean. Nothing, nothing in the world like that. That absolute authority of which the baby must be convinced in order to feel safe, separate from the mother’s body. The honor the mother must give the baby, when the baby is ready to know that her absolute authority was never real. The careful timing of the revelation that, baby, you are alone, as alone as anything can be. How lucky you were, baby, to have been a baby with its mother. Now you are ready to start living life in the imagination, to start imagining your way back to every good feeling you don’t quite remember from the days of milk.

— Sarah Manguso, Liars: A Novel (Hogarth, July 23, 2024)

Notes:

  1. Book Reviews of “Liars”
  2. Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child. Lightly.

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Nothing to be done, he thinks, nothing at all. Short-term memory loss is an inevitable part of growing old, and if it’s not forgetting to zip your zipper, it’s marching off to search the house for your reading glasses while you’re holding the glasses in your hand, or going downstairs to accomplish two small tasks, to retrieve a book from the living room and to pour yourself a glass of juice in the kitchen, and then returning to the second floor with the book but not the juice, or the juice but not the book, or else neither one because some third thing has distracted you on the ground floor and you’ve gone back upstairs empty-handed, having forgotten why you went down there in the first place. It’s not that he didn’t do those kinds of things when he was young, or forget the name of this actress or that writer or blank out the name of the secretary of commerce, but the older you become, the more often these things happen to you, and if they begin to happen so often that you barely know where you are anymore and can no longer keep track of yourself in the present, you’re gone, still alive but gone. They used to call it senility. Now the term is dementia, but one way or the other, Baumgartner knows that even if he winds up there in the end, he still has a long way to go. He can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same. Good.

— Paul Auster, Baumgartner: A Novel (Atlantic Monthly Press, November 7, 2023)

Notes:

  • 50% thru a short book. Man can write.
  • NY Time Book Review by Fiona Maazel, November 6, 2023: “Paul Auster Walks the Long Valley of Grief in a New Novel. In ‘Baumgartner,’ a professor contends with mortality and the haunting memory of his wife.”
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Sunday Morning

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“In relationships, I’ve observed that a partner can start out as a friend, then become a passion, then a co-parent, a mother or a father of your children, and if you’re really fortunate, the partner remains—or returns as—a friend. It’s a lower-temperature take on a romantic life, but it’s enduring. I have been so fortunate. Great friendships can survive most of the crap thrown at them. They thrive on the manure of shared disappointment and drama. It’s hard to imagine a force as great as romantic love, but friendship comes close. Someone once argued that “friendship is higher than love,” and I understood what they meant. It may not be as melodramatic or grandiose or passionate as love, but friendship is often deeper and wider. Great friendships explain why we hold on to this life so tightly because it disappears so quickly. Just as Ali and I were becoming best friends, I was aware of the wider web of deep friendships we had both grown up in, this sacrament of friendship from the band to the community around us. Relationships we had chosen, not ones chosen for us by blood. Pandemics aside, I still embrace people when I meet them, which goes all the way back to the days of Shalom when that’s how we would say hello. I don’t know that I’ve ever shaken somebody’s hand without having to think about it. My instinct to hail a friend is to hold them.

— Bono, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono” (Knopf, November 1, 2022)

Photo: Bono portrait by John Hewson

Here’s comes the Bride…

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Rachel Kanigan & Andrew Lasota were married yesterday to form Andrew & Rachel Lasota!

Man in the background is Eric Kanigan (Son) who officiated the Wedding (and did an amazing job…)

(No photos of Dad, who couldn’t hold it together…)

Thank you Jan Morrison for the real-time pictures!