RSSwrinkled as a walnut shell [excerpts]
Feb 10
Uncategorized books you should read, kidney beans and liver, the body as memory, the space between us, thrity umrigar No Comments
I’m currently reading The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar. It’s a beautiful story of Sera and Bhima, an upper middle-class Parsi woman and her housekeeper, respectfully. I’ve found an honesty in this story about life and prejudice that one seldom sees. One excerpt in particular has stuck with me:
From the time she was in her teens, Sera has been fascinated by this paradox–how a body that we occupy, that we have worn like a coat from the moment of our birth–from before our birth, even–is still a stranger to use. After all, almost everything we do in our lives is for the well-being of the body: we bathe daily, polish our teeth, groom our hair and fingernails; we work miserable jobs in order to feed and clothe it; we go to great lengths to protect it from pain and violence and harm. And yet the body remains a mystery, a book that we have never read. Sera plays with this irony, toys with it as if it were a puzzle: How, despite our lifelong preoccupation with our bodies, we have never met fact-to-face with our kidneys, how we wouldn’t recognize our own liver in a row of livers, how we have never seen our heart or brain. We know more about the depths of the ocean, are more acquainted with the far corners of outer space than with our own organs and muscles and bones. So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties.
But if this is true, surely the body also remembers each kindness, each kiss, each act of compassion? Surely this is our salvation, our only hope–that joy and love are also woven into the fabric of the body, into each sinewy muscle, into the core of each pulsating cell?
That leaves me only one thing to say: read it.