Words&Dirt

“What is it about an infant’s crying that makes it so powerful, able to break down the order you depend on, inside and outside of yourself? It is like a storm––insistent, theatrical, yet in a way pure and uncontrived. It is reproachful rather than supplicating––it comes out of a rage that can’t be dealt with, a birthright rage free of love and pity, ready to crush your brains inside your skull.”

––Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014, by Alice Munro, pg. 119

“Why, Child-Who-Never-Was, am I feeling a little down as I assemble these thoughts? I never thought that you were someone to miss until I began looking at the empty chair where you might have sat. Who would you have been? Would you have had big ears like me, big nose, big head? Would you have had my long feet? Would you have been a loner one day and a social person the next, the guy who loved the party so much that he’d be the last to say good night? Would you have loved animals? What about music? The sea––would you have wanted to be near it, in it, and evaluated every place in terms of how many miles it was from the water? Would you have carried my essence forward in ways I wouldn’t have known? Would you have taught me how to ski or to care about football or to make a devil’s food cake from scratch?”

–– “The New Rhoda,” by Paul Lisicky, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, ed. Meghan Daum, pg. 70