understand. You can’t feel remorse later when you laughed so
hard then. I have never— to this day and including right now—
given a damn. Why is it that when you laugh so hard you can’t
weep or understand? Oh, little girls, weep forever or understand too much but be a little scared to laugh too hard.
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Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
There was a stone fence, only about two feet high, uneven,
rough, broken, and behind it the mountains: a hill declining,
rolling down, and beyond the valley where it met the road the
mountains rose up, not hills but high mountain peaks, in winter
covered in snow from top to bottom, in fall and spring the
peaks white and blindingly bright and the rest underneath the
pearly caps browns and greens and sometimes dark, fervent
purples where the soil mixed with varying shades of light
coming down from the sky. The building near the stone wall,
facing out in back over the descending hill to the road and
then the grandeur of the mountains, was white and wood, old,
fragile against this bold scenery, slight against it. When it
snowed the frail building could have been part of a drawing, a
mediocre, sentimental New England house in a New England
snow, a white on white cliche, except exquisite: delicate, exquisite, so finely drawn under its appearance of being a cheap scene of the already observed, the cliched, the worn-down-into-the-ground snow scene. In the fall, the trees were lush with
yellow and crimson and purple saturated the distant soil. Green
got duller, then turned a burnt brown. The sky was huge, not
sheltering, but right down on the ground with you so that you
walked in it: your feet had to reach down to touch earth. Wind
married the sky and tormented it: but the earth stayed below
solid and never swirled around in the fight. There was no dust.
The earth was solid down in the ground, always. There was
no hint of impermanence, sand. This was New England, where
the ground did not bend or break or compromise: it rested
there, solid and placid and insensitive to the forms its own
magnificence took as it rose up in mountains of ominous
heights. These were not mountains that crumbled or fell down
in manic disorder. These were not mountains that slid or split
apart or foamed over. These were mountains where the sky
reached down to touch them in their solid splendor with their
great trees and broken branches and dwarfed stones, and they
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stayed put because the earth was solid, just purely itself, not
mixed with sky or air or water, not harboring fire or ash: no
ice sliding down to kill anything in its path: no snow tumbling
to destroy: just dirt, solid ground, made so that humans could
