the history of love, by nicole krauss, is such a story.  from the title, you might guess that this book has something to do with love, and you would be right.  what you don’t know it that the title is also the title to a book in the story.  a book that’s as central to the story as any of the characters.  a book about love, and loss.

she was gone.  and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

for a long time, it remained hollow.  years, maybe.  and when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt would have been impossible without alma.  if it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

the book itself is a bit of a mystery.  who wrote it?  how did it find its way here and there?  in the span of 70 years and three continents, this book ends up pushing each of the characters forward in their search for truth.  and somehow, somewhere along they way, they all end up saving each other –

a polish survivor of the holocaust who does not want to die alone and unnoticed; a teenage girl who struggles to come to terms with the loss of her father; a solitary, exiled writer haunted by nightmares of the holocaust; a lonely boy who believes that god has destined him for great things.

as complex as it may sound, it’s actually quite profound in it’s simplicity –  just like all the things that truly matter.

really, there isn’t much to say.

he was a great writer.

he fell in love.

it was his life.

there will come a time

when you believe

everything is finished;

that will be the beginning.

(louis l’amour)

there was nowhere to go

but everywhere,

so just keep on

rolling under the stars.

(jack kerouac)

i thank you for this most amazing day,

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees,

and for the blue dream of sky

and for everything which is natural,

which is infinite,

which is yes.

(e.e. cummings)

watch with glittering eyes

the whole world around you

because the greatest secrets

are always hidden in

the most unlikely places.

(roald dahl)

it’s all there,

but hard to find the beginning

and impossible to fathom the end.

(jeanette winterson)

nobody has ever measured,

not even poets,

how much the heart can hold.

(zelda fitzgerald)

certain these clouds go somewhere, billowing out to somewhere. (t. amos)

life changes fast.

life changes in an instant.

you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

so begins the book, the year of magical thinking, by joan didion.  the book chronicals the year following the death of didion’s huband, and the sudden (and ultimately fatal) illness of her only daughter.

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.  as we were.  as we are no longer.  as we will one day not be at all.

grief, sorrow, madness, pain, confusion — they are all among the cast of characters in this tale of loss and healing — sprinkled in somewhere along the way, comfort. i found this book right when i needed it most.

i noticed the other day that the text on the cover of the book is black save for a few letters in blue.  together, those blue letters spell, john, didion’s husband’s name.  a fitting and beautiful tribute to a life shared, lost, and remembered.

to me, words are one of the few things that possess some absolute quality of truth.  not spoken words, but written words.  that probably explains why i’m such a collector of words — i have notebooks upon notebooks full of quotes, thoughts, random words that i don’t want to forget.

when i communicate with others, i prefer to do it in two ways — face-to-face or in writing.  of those two, there’s something magical about a written exchange.  i love reading and re-reading the words of others.  i love the text itself, the letters, whether handwritten or in type.  i find beauty in the absoluteness of words — they exist independently, and are not qualified or limited by anything.  words are pure and unconditional.

think about it:  i can write you a lie, but the words will be true.

ask me to recall a conversation, and you get my truth, my impression, which has been filtered through my experience and my lenses of reality.  my version of the exchange might be nothing more than a pale and lifeless rendering of the teller’s original story, long since dissolved into the ether.  but with written words, there is a promise of permanence, that in two months, two years, two decades, the words will remain the same.  sure, the context in which they are read may change, but the words themselves are no different.  the words are safe and untouched — almost like the faces in a photograph.

and it’s there, in that promise, that i find both beauty and truth.