How I Became a Nun

Cesar Aira
Tr. Chris Andrews

My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil.

Sometimes when I write stuff it seems so complex and beautiful and intricate...and then I let someone else read it and it doesn't make any sense at all.

White Noise

Don DeLillo

We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.

People think I’m spacey, she said. I have a spacey theory about human fear, sure enough. Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn’t be here or you shouldn’t. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self—the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give to this complicated process is fear.

How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.

The flow is constant, Alfonse said. Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

I was standing in the coolness of the dairy aisle at the grocery store. In front of me in neat little rows were colorful cups of yogurt with their prettily depicted flavors. I like to stand in the dairy aisle, so mysteriously lit, cooled, and restocked. Even during winter, it's a pleasant place to be. It's always peaceful, quiet except for the soft hum of the refrigerator system and the music played over the supermarket speakers. Sometimes I even bask in this place, half asleep and half daydreaming. Oh, the fantasies I've had in the dairy aisle.
But today something is different. The hum of the cooling motors is underlined by a sharper more distant noise. It sounds like the store is a giant anthill with millions of scrabbling, husky insects working their way back and forth. Something is up. The noise is growing. Louder than the music now. The yogurt cups are shaking in their slots. One that was precariously balanced falls off the shelf with a clatter. I bend over to prop it up and they come around the corner.
It's a mob. Mad! Wild, they are pushing and screaming and shoving, crawling over each other. Blood on some faces, sweat on all of them. Everything is in disarray. They stop in front of the milk, just short of where I stand. Someone is thrown back against the cheeses. Another, a woman, falls and is trampled. They are fighting over the milk. They are demanding milk, screaming to the stockers in the back to bring out more. Several people have actually crawled into the back through the now empty shelves. A gallon of milk in tug of war breaks open and showers the crowd. People lap it up like dogs. A man raises a gun above his head and waves it around like a cowboy hat. he has two gallons of milk in his left hand, but before he can make his escape, the mob drags him down. Someone bites his hand.
Noises are coming from behind the shelves of dairy products. Soon milk jugs are being tossed out to teh waiting crowd. Their hands are stretched forward like an octopus or anenome, like plants gravitating toward the sun. But no flow can match their demand and as the crowd begins to jostle and fight over the jugs, a woman's voice rises above the din:
"They have milk at the supermarket in Sunset Square!"
And like a swarm of locuts they are gone. I am left in the aisle with my yogurt. I pick it up. It is orange creamsickle flavored. Extra creamy according to the lid. I put it back on the shelf, look at the silent body fo teh woman who was trampled by the mob. I decide that I don't want to buy yogurt today.

Somebody Owes Me Money

Donald E Westlake

I bet none of it would have happened if I wasn't so eloquent. That's always been my problem, eloquence, though some might claim my problem was something else again. But life's a gamble, is what I say, and not all the eloquent people in this world are in Congress.

Once you introduce dum-dum bullets into a plot, you cannot go about forgetting this fact. Authors, Westlake or otherwise, can't simply go about tossing dum-dum bullets into guns, having evil criminals muttering while they carve dum-dum bullets at their kitchen table, and finding whopping holes blown in victims by guns firing dum-dum bullets. And then unceremoniously forget that they ever existed. It's not ethical.

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

Yann Martel

In what oyster did I want to be the grain of sand?

My words always have a way of meaning to me what I feel. If I say that It rained today in bent droplets, that might mean many things to many people, but to me at the moment it means what I meant. Without dipping into complete relativism, words and especially stories are containers of meaning, but meaning that is supplied by the user, only stories to affect the meaning supplied--they have a way of turning what is green into blue and brown into purple, or maybe they take what was green and give you Bach's Goldberg Variations or again maybe they take that brown and out comes the saddest moment of your life up to this point. The idea is that stories have a lot of power, but only because they have to become a part of you in order for you to enjoy them, use them, or even hear them.
I can never tell stories like Yann Martel. He has more webs than I and a broader vision than my own, yet I can enjoy them. Whether he catches you from your stomach and ties it to your brain in its most logical part or whether he tickles your toes and then you find out that he was actually tearing apart the way you understood your complicated little life, it makes no difference; he has a force in his stories that is hidden behind their trickiness. But surprisingly, it's not a trickiness I resent. This is perhaps because he lacks sarcasm.
So I'll settle for my own sad brand of story telling, heavy with its sarcasm, out of control, so full of passion and fervor that it begins to aspire (sadly) to Kazantzakis. What I learned though, from Martel, was that stories can use logic to defy itself.

Gould's Book of Fish

Richard Flanagan

As for me, they have taken the book and everything away now, and what are books anyway but unreliable fairy tales?

While such detail tallied with the life described in the Book of Fish, the historical Gould’s subsequent convict record suggests a life entirely at odds with that which had so captivated me. It sometimes seemed as if the author of the Book of Fish, the storyteller William Buelow Gould, had been born with a memory but neither experience nor history to account for it, and had spent forever after seeking to invent what didn’t exist in the curious belief that his imagination might become his experience, and thereby both explain and cure his problem of an inconsolable memory.

It’s the only way anyone ever got to rule & I for one didn’t seek to argue with it, only to derive a small living on its fringes. For as Capois Death said, if shit ever becomes valuable, the poor will be born without arseholes. That was our fate, & I didn’t pretend I could alter it, I only wished to survive as best I could, & what else was I to do? I had no desire to become a sawyer or shepherd or whaling deckhand. I didn’t have the hands or back for it, far less the necessary practical skills.

Do you think I was only gaoled? I wished to cry out as she turned to leave & rapped thrice on the door for Pobjoy to come & open—for I too was the gaoler. Do you think to keep my own hide unflogged I never lied? Never stole off a mate? I have a weakness for blue gin, old women, white rum, young girls, porter, pisco, human company & the Commandant’s laudanum. I have a great fear of pain. I am beyond shame. Do you think I never informed on a mate? I was both cobber & dobber, I liked them & wept for them when they took them off to be flogged on my false information. I survived. It was bad & wrong & I may as well be the cat-o’-nine tails stripping bark off their backs when I traded souls for some scraps of food or paint. I gave away all I needed. I was a vile piece of cell-shit. I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didn’t stop itching. I was Australia. I was dying before I was born. I was a rat eating its young. I was Mary Magdalene. I was Jesus. I was sinner. I was saint. I was flesh & flesh’s appetite & flesh’s union & death & love were all equally rank & all equally beautiful in my eyes. I cradled their broken bodies dying. I kissed their suppurating boils. I washed their skinny shanks filled with ulcers, rotting craters of pus; I was that pus & I was spirit & I was God & I was untranslatable & unknowable even to myself. How I hated myself for it. How I wished to essay the universe I loved which was me also & how I wanted to know why it was that in my dreams I flew through oceans & why when I awoke I was the earth smelling of freshly turned peat. No man could answer me my angry lamentations nor could they hear my jokes why I had to suffer this life. I was God & I was pus & whatever was me was You & You were Holy, Your feet, Your bowels, Your mound, Your armpits, Your smell & Your sound & taste, Your fallen Beauty, I was Divine in Your image & I was You & I was no longer long for this grand earth & why is it no words would tell how I was so much hurting aching bidding farewell?

Stories as written are progressive, sentence must build upon sentence as brick upon brick, yet the beauty of this life in its endless mystery is circular. Sun & moon, spheres endlessly circling. Black man, full circle; white man, bisected circle; life, the third circle, on & on, & round & round.

Sometimes I even want to tap with my long snout on those divers’ goggles & say: You want to know what this country will become? Ask me—after all, if you can’t trust a liar & a forger, a whore & an informer, a convicted murderer & a thief, you’ll never understand this country. Because we all make our accommodations with power, & the mass of us would sell our brother or sister for a bit of peace & quiet. We’ve been trained to live a life of moral cowardice while all the time comforting ourselves that we are nature’s rebels. But in truth we’ve never got upset & excited about anything; we’re like the sheet we shot the Aborigines to make way for, docile until slaughter.

There is no such thing as non-fiction. It is not a coincidence that histories are written. That would seem to make all history a piece of writing, books, stories, fiction. There is the notion that fiction exists and so does non-fiction. But did it ever occur to you that this is a curious way to talk about made-up stories? There is truth and there is un-truth but there is not lie and un-lie. There is reality and unreality, but there is not imagination and non-imagination.
Generally, invented things are defined in negative terms while things that are true are defined in positive terms. So you can't have un-dream or non-dream, this is reality, but something can be unreal, this is dream. But the situation is reversed when it comes to writing. There is fiction and non-fiction and though we are taught that fiction is not real and non-fiction is, neither is quite so much either.
So what about history? What about these non-fiction books that are sold as histories? Was Heroditus a writer of fiction or non-fiction? Was Ovid? What about Homer? Works that clearly include events which could not have happened do seem to be less than non-fiction, or would the term be more than?
Pretty invented stories. Unreliable fairytales. Artificially constructed dreams. The lies of poets.
Think through these terms. There is so much more than fiction and non-fiction going on in them. Stating the obvious they plunge us into a world where stories are more like realities than not. Think on the truth of fiction for a while; it will do you more good than all the non-fiction in the world (remember: there isn't any).

The Elephant Man

Ashley Montagu

When I am next moved can I go to a blind asylum or to a lighthouse?

He did not like to discuss it as a play but rather as a vision of some actual world. When this mood possessed him he would say: I wonder what the prince did after we left? Or Do you think that poor man is still in the dungeon? And so on and so on.

The tales were very real to him, as real as any narrative in the Bible, so that he would tell them to me as incidents in the lives of people who had lived. In his outlook upon the world he was a child, yet a child with some of the tempestuous feelings of a man.

The Elephant Man is one of the most interesting characters I have yet heard of. And he is real. Or it is a agreed that he existed. Or there was a life lived of someone close to the description of the Elephant Man.
A great reader of romances in his later days, it is said that he did not distinguish the fiction from the fact. Should he have? I have a sneaking suspicion that not very many of us can distinguish the fiction from fact. We simply enjoy the fiction that we can. Names, titles, sentence structure, words, interpretations, etc., all these things help to put fiction into our factual realities. We ourselves go busily about creating fictions of our own existence in order to become more appealing to the people we like, in order to seem more suited for the positions we want to occupy in society. Why should it be so strange to us that the arbitrary denomination of a certain story as fact and all the rest as fiction, is itself fiction?
The Elephant Man didn't resemble an Elephant in the least. It is said that he acquired that show name because of the way his mouth was deformed. But more, he acquired the name because it was exotic and would bring people in. The Misshapen Man doesn't have the same ring, despite it's alliteration.

Growth of the Soil

Knut Hamsun

Walking up along the river one evening, Sivert suddenly stops: down on the water sit two wild ducks, male and female. They have spotted him, they have seen a human being and become apprehensive; one of them says something, a brief sound, a melody of three notes, which the other answers correspondingly. The same moment they take off, spin like two little wheels a stone’s throw upriver and settle once more. Then one of them says something again and the other answers; it is the same language as the first time, but with a touch of blissfulness for being saved: it is pitched two octaves higher! Sivert stands there watching the bids, seeing past them far into a dream. A sound had sailed through him, a sweetness, leaving him with a fine, thin remembrance of something wild and beautiful, something previously experienced but effaced. He walks home in silence, doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t chatter about it; it was nothing like mundane speech. It was Sivert Sellanra, young and ordinary who experienced this when he walked out one evening.

It worked out—everything worked out. But Isak began to feel tired in the evenings, whatever the reason might be. It was not as if he simply had to build a sawmill and that was the end of it, all the other things had to be done as well. The hay was in, but the grain was ripening and must soon be cut and the sheaves put on stakes, and the potatoes would also have to be dug up before long. But Isak had an excellent help in the boys. He didn’t thank them, that wasn’t done among folks of their sort, but he was mightily pleased with them. Once in a while they would sit down for a moment in the middle of the work period and talk together; then the father might, almost in dead earnest, consult with his boys about what they should tackle next and what later. These were proud moments for the boys, and they learned to consider carefully before speaking, lest they should be in the wrong. “It would be too bad if we didn’t manage to roof the sawmill before the fall rain sets in,” their father said.

There are big people in this world and they do big and serious things. There are people who are going to achieve greatness in this lifetime. There are people who will become rich, there are people who will become famous, there are even people who will have their names recorded in history. There are people who have done everything they should do, people who invest in the right stocks, land the right jobs, achieve the correct positions and their lives have meaning. They don't worry at night, when the nightbirds are singing (though the big people aren't listening) that their lives have been wastes; that their lives have lacked consequence. Big people have big lives, both are important.

It was Sivert Sellanra, young and ordinary who experienced this when he walked out one evening.

Is Sivert a big man or is he little? He is recorded, his name is written down for us to mark the occasion that he experienced this thing. While walking he heard two birds. Isn't it astounding? But yes, it is.
Bigness is not always to be sought after. Sometimes the big things are so big that they are boring and simple and not at all interesting. There is rarely anything about the big that feels like a cluttered desk or a dirty room--in other words big is not cozy.
Now it seems to me that it's a dangerous thing to say that one would like to live a cozy life. The man who says this risks incurring the anger of the crowds who would respond to him that he doesn't have aims, ambition, goals, purpose--he might even be called a coward. Because when we come down to the hardness of the bones in our thought, anything less than great achievement is failure.
But I am not yet convinced. I spend my time on the fence. Sometimes I worry that I, too, must ascend the great ladder which the majority of people fall off, feel bad about falling off, and fall further. I worry that if I wake up when I'm seventy and haven't done anything of consequence, I will have this terrible sinking feeling that I am a waste--that I am the man who buried his talents in the ground, that I made nothing where so many others have made something.
But there is also this thought: how many amazing events would the eyes of a man of seventy unblinded by the bigness of big lights see? If I can manage to withhold from writing the next great American novel, solving some vital issue of poverty, winning the acclaim of my fellow countrymen, establishing a new corporate dynasty, thinking thoughts that are generally acknowledged as brilliant, if I can avoid all these big pitfalls, there is the chance that I might actually witness a few moments where God steps out from behind his hiding veil, like the Garden Queen. Surely a few glimpses of God on this Earth are worth more than most big things. And knowing God, even little as I do, the glimpses would come as bountifully as the fruit on a tree.
The sentence "It was Sivert Sellanra, young and ordinary who experienced this when he walked out one evening" captures my heart. I want a life that is worthy to be recorded for this instance. I want to be written down because I happened to be the man, that lucky man, who awake one night in his bed, heard a barn owl hooting on his roof, and, though it be asking too much, heard its mate hooting back.

The Discovery of Slowness

Sten Nadolny

Writing was as arduous as a sea voyage; it generated the energies and hopes it needed while also providing enough for the rest of one’s life. Whoever had to write a book could not be desperate forever. And despair over proper formulations could be conquered with sufficient industry.

He also sat in coffee houses. There he could get pen, ink, and paper whenever anything important occurred to him. Actually nothing occurred to John, but he ordered writing materials just the same, stared at the white sheet of paper, and thought, If I have something important in mind, I’ll just write it down. Well, perhaps it also worked the other way round: If I have something to write on, perhaps something important will come to me. And so it happened: suddenly the Idea appeared. It seemed foolhardy to John, but that spoke more for the Idea than against it, especially since the project was in some respects similar to a long journey. The Idea: writing! John conceived of writing a book to justify himself, a fat book in which he would seek to convert all skeptics and convince them of his system. And since he knew what a footloose fellow the human will was, he committed himself in writing then and there. He wrote on the white sheet: Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea—not under 100,000 words. That rescued the plan at the last minute, for the head had already begun to whisper its objections. For example, John Franklin, if there is anything you cannot do, it’s writing books!

The compulsion to be constantly occupied with what is important to mankind necessarily affected more and more thoughts and actions. John sensed that someday, simply out of duty toward equality, he would have to discover that he was interchangeable with others. But from his time in the navy he knew full well what it was like when one’s unique self became insignificant. There remained only the escape into quickness. Someone was better if he could do the same thing faster. And this choice was not open to him.

That’s not the point, replied Eleanor. This sentence worried John, for since the time with Flora Reed he knew only too well: a quarrel in which one person told the other what it was all about left no room for a solution.

We ourselves are the chance. The listeners turned their heads: Franklin. Not that they had understood him. But if anybody considered carefully what he said, it was Franklin. So they still thought about it for a little while. He always had the courage to look stupid long enough to be smart—one could well copy that! In other respects, too, he had a tough skull. No bullet could get through it. God surely still had plans for Franklin. They helped him where they could.

Friendship consisted of plans and actions; everything else only falsified it.

I have been reading many books about Sir John Franklin lately. The Terror by Dan Simmons which was so pathetic I didn't read more than a quarter of it; Rifles by William Vollmann which I did finish, and also this one by Sten Nadonly. Of all of them, I think I like Nadonly's portrayal of Franklin the best. It is by far the most sympathetic. Simmons' painted Franklin as a selfish, deluded, simpering idiot. Vollmann made him a haggard old failure of a man, but Nadonly gave him something unique.
I don't imagine that Nadonly's fiction of Franklin is anything other than fiction, but as long as we are dealing with things I don't know, I'd like to now know Franklin in this way rather than any other.
The Discovery of Slowness is rich with the marvel of a child. Nadonly's Franklin moves through the world as a circle within a circle, somehow cut off from the reality by his slow speed. It gives you a sense of peering out of a submarine at the ocean world rather than being a fish with Franklin in the sea. It's a pleasant feeling.

Tigers of the Snow

Jonathan Neale

There is a word that people use a lot in Khumbu—dhukpaai. Dhukpaa means hardship, but also suffering. It means work that is unfair, and too hard. It also means the oppression of employers who hire people for that work, and who treat them unfairly, who make the poor suffer. Dhukpaa, dhukpaa, they say, and sigh, meaning: There it is, what can you do about it, you have to put up with it, but this is not how things should be.

Lincoln's Melancholy

Joshua Wolf Shenk

Never has the conditions for a president-elect been so severe, and never had one seemed, by his credentials, so poorly prepared. Lincoln’s fifteen predecessors had included war hero generals, vice presidents, secretaries of state, and veterans of Congress. His own resume listed, as he put it, “one term in the lower house of Congress.” He’d had barely a year of formal education; he had few connections in the capital and no executive experience. Before coming to Washington, he had been east of the Alleghenies just a handful of times and still bore the stamp of a man raised on the frontier.

Can we say that Lincoln was “mentally ill”? Without question, he meets the U.S. surgeon general’s definition of mental illness, since he experienced “alterations in thinking, mood, or behavior” that were associated with “distress and/or impaired functioning.” Yet Lincoln also meets the surgeon general’s criteria for mental health: “the successful performance of mental function, resulting in productive activities, fulfilling relationships with other people, and the ability to adapt to change and to cope with adversity.” By this standard, few historical figures led such a healthy life.

Lincoln, of course, is not the only nineteenth-century figure in whom intense suffering coexisted with great achievement. Modern researchers have identified one or more major mood disorders in John Quincy Adams, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Disraeli, William James, William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert Schumann, Leo Tolstoy, Queen Victoria, and many others. We may accurately call these luminaries “mentally ill,” a label that has some use—as did our early diagnosis of Lincoln—insofar as it indicates the depth, severity, and quality of their trouble. However, if we get stuck on the label, we may miss the core fascination, which is how illness can coexist with marvelous well-being.

I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.

I make no apology, gentlemen, for my weakness.

I, like sloping rock, lie on tumble hill test, to fall or fly, or stay on just where I am. There is only one way to go and that way is down because there is only one way gravity pulls and that is towards itself. Can't be that stones should one day have flight? Gain the air and make off into the beautiful blue that is open up there?
Gentlemen, I make no apology for my weakness. I make no apology at all. That's why all these rocks are migrating through our airspace, Mr President. Like a sudden flight of insects or the airborne bombardment of a flock of angry birds the rocks are rising. What would you have me do? Grin so that they might knock out all my teeth? Well, no, but tears surely won't help. I beg to differ, Mr Secretary. What is the one substance that has dominion over stones, though it may be a slow dominion? Why, what else, Mr Secretary, but water. But saltwater, Mr President? Do you expect me to believe saltwater is better your sovereignty than gunpowder? Especially the saltwater of tears, Mr President? You are President, not Pastor. Oh, dear Mr Secretary. What do you know of the powers that be? You think gunpowder more able to split rocks then water, especially tear water. This is not a little foolish.
I could go on for some hours, Mr Secretary, but I am fatigued. Would you be so kind as to see these gentlemen out? Shoot them in the front of their heads if you would like, I only thought it would be less unpleasant for you to do it from behind. And so it goes.
They tell me I was killed in a theater. Unfortunately, I did not know how to act. I believe this inability directly led to my death. Had I acted, put on a bit of a show, prevaricated some you know, made a few nods to the grim opposition, they might not have shot me. Useless, useless he said when he shot me. And so my friend joined the long list of men who had to find nothing to find everything. It saddens my heart that this man should have struggled so hard to kill me and thus find meaning, when all he had to do was talk with me. While I am not such a brilliant orator as to persuade a man from murder, I am such a miserable man as to impart some bit of the futility rife in life to a man, thereby disarming him more thoroughly then any martial arts expert might have. There is a great defeating force in depression: Douglass Adams knew this: just look at Marvin. But that isn't particularly surprising: many wise souls have known this: Quoholeth, Lao Zi, Lewis Carrol, and Junious knew.
But then again, Junius always knew.
What can a dead man say? I was shot in the back of the head. If I hadn't been shot there, they would have shot me in the face, or perhaps failing that, torn me limb from limb. And there isn't really anything for it. My heart was doomed, and that's why it was so heavy. Or maybe my heart was heavy and that was why it was so doomed.