Firing a rifle shot seems to happen quickly, but what about the movement of the trigger finger? What about the decision to fire the rifle? What about all your careful target practice? What about everything in your life that happened before you decide to fire that rifle?
How can you separate the incidental from what was necessary to your decision to pull the trigger?
Nothing happens in an instant. Nothing starts happening and nothing finishes happening. History doesn’t begin anywhere. And it doesn’t end.
Why is it important to me to know the beginning and end of this particular decay I think I’m writing about — which is just part of my own whole decay?
And couldn’t the decay be called by many other names — for instance, my life?
The End
There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else’s.
This is the usual sort of book about illness. Someone gets sick, someone gets well.
Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of a self.
Most people consider their own suffering a widely applicable model, and I am no exception.
This is suffering’s lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.
You might not know to love it.
But to pay attention is to love everything.
To see the future as brightness.
Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see things only as their own fatal brightness, and there is nothing after that brightness.
You can’t learn from remembering. You can’t learn from guessing.
You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness, into brightness.
About the Author
Sarah Manguso is the author of two books of poetry, Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise, and the short story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape. In 2007 she was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.