I finished Rumi and the Red Handbag by Shawna Lemay this morning and I dissolved into tears; I had my soul filled with light and was blinded with said light, and it was horrific and lovely and so, so beautiful. I was recommended it by someone who reviewed The Fairy Tale Museum, and you know how that made me feel. So. It was…like TFTM, and yet not. It had the same kind of beauty, but was more solid, less surrealistic. But I loved it, even so. Thus! Quotes and quotes and quotes.
“I had dropped out of a doctoral program and had internalised my identity as a failed scholar quickly. This new identity did something to me, compressed my spine, and all of the fear I harboured did not turn into fearlessness but rather an agitated despair. I often felt lost and dizzy and numb and stupid all in a rush. I became suddenly interested in all the nuances of my own dreams rather than with anything I had ever read, I was liquid where before I had been solid.”
“I knew I would always be distant from her, but this distance was immediate and irrevocably intimate, filling me with the most intense apprehension for random instants.”
“Secrets, anyway, are usually incidental. How you keep one is important, how you choose to live with it, let it alter you, matters. Perhaps is makes you a kinder person, someone more willing to forgive and understand. Secrets have that potential.”
“I was born wary. I just was. And whenever I talked myself out of that wariness on the grounds that it was plainly foolish, I got burned. I got sent a flaming email or found myself backing away, slowly, carefully, having discovered something unsavoury.’
“And though I cannot put it into words at all, no not at all, at the time I knew I was experiencing something that changed my chemical makeup in some small but significant manner.”
A quote in a quote:
“How to set the direction of the soul? The soul’s compass? We began with the words of Simone Weil, ‘If the soul is set in the direction of love…the nearer we approach to the beauty of the world.’ Was this our goal? To approach nearer to the beauty of the world?”
“The idea of hoarding thoughts, holding so many threads of ideas like cupped water as you knelt, knees grinding into the finest gravel, thirsty by a mountain stream, did not terrify or oppress by instead exhilarated her.”
“And all those people who automatically disparage romances, I don’t trust them, you know? What are they afraid of? The small fantasies of millions of women? I wonder.”
“And here she laughed her sparkly etude and I thought of Chopin and white twinkle lights on late summer nights and sequins at a dull office party.”
“It is not how one soul approaches another but in how it distances itself from it that I recognise their affinity and relatedness.”
“And let’s not forget, cosmic snow, delicate and elegant, tinged with an otherworldly pink and blue.”
“I myself don’t want the disruption of those whose soul lacks luminosity.”
“Are we not ensouled? Are we not entwined? Have we not made a mark on each other, however slippery the soul might be? We do care for each other, we do!”