this hand that writes

excerpt from faces in the crowd by valeria luiselli

in winter there were windstorms. but i used to wear miniskirts because i was young. i wrote letters to my acquaintances telling them about my rambles, describing my legs swathed in gray tights, my body wrapped in a red coat with deep pockets. i wrote letters about the cold wind that caressed those legs, compared the freezing air to the bristle of a badly shaved chin, as if the air and a pair of gray legs walking along streets were literary material. when a person has lived alone for a long time, the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax: this face, these bones that walk, this mouth, this hand that writes.

now i write at night, when the two children are asleep and it's acceptable to smoke, drink, and let drafts in. before, i used to write all the time, at any hour, because my body belonged to me. my legs were long, strong, and slim. it was right to offer them: to whomever, to writing.

outimacy

from sidewalks by valeria luiselli

"the nostalgia isn't always a nostalgia for a past. there are things that produce nostalgia in advance -- spaces that we know to be lost as soon as we find them -- places in which we know ourselves to be happier than we will ever be afterwards. in such situations, the soul twists itself around, as if in a voluntary simulacrum of seeing its present in retrospect. like an eye watching itself look from the perspective of a later time, it sees that remote present and yearns for it."

"cities, like our bodies, like language, are destruction under construction."

"we live in a world in which there has been a complete inversion of the status of the street as the public space and the house as the ultimate private space. in this redistribution of the private-public categories it's difficult to know when we're really inside and when out. i say this without the least hint of nostalgia. in the street we can no longer commune with solitude, and even in our own homes, we can't be with ourselves without the windows of computers claiming our already deficient attention or the neighbors installing themselves in the backyard of our brains"

"conversely, intelligent people who grow up thinking one thing and, on reaching a certain age, realize that everything they believed is open to doubt -- stark, brutal doubt -- can truly enjoy a profound crisis that, in the worst cases, leads them to know themselves a little better. as t.s. eliot contends, the spirit of belief is impossible to separate from the demon of doubt."