losses gathering force

 

 paper graveyards

Where and when do those small sadnesses feel allowed in the face of all the Big Sadness around us? But that’s the whole thing, and that is Heti’s genius: how fully she is able to show us that the tragedy of the world is all those minor losses gathering force. A single woman and her single loss, formally recast and sanctified within art, is also about all of us, mourning the whole world at the same time.

Having deemed this “draft” of life too flawed, God, according to Heti’s fourth novel, is “ready to go at creation a second time.”

 Sheila Heti, Pure Colour review

For if we consider the innumerable corpses, which, partly, the ravages of the plague and partly, the weapons of war, have filled not only our Germany, but almost the whole of Europe, then we must admit that our roses have been transformed into thorns, our lilies into nettles, our paradises into cemeteries, indeed our whole being into an image of death. It is therefore my hope that it will not be held against me that in the general theater of death I have foreborne to set up my own paper graveyard.

Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.231