Fragmentation is Freedom

This is my first post in a while. I have been preoccupied. It's been so tragic and lovely.

I had an old boyfriend in town. He's been travelling. We ran from College to College, avoiding the angry rain and the hordes of Italian teenagers. We passed neat quadrangles, stone corridors and important man paintings, shouting out things over the heads of school teachers like 'So you didn't find yourself in India then?'

I had to say goodbye to a new friend, on the last corner of Queens Lane. He did not like how I kept on looking away. His eyes made me feel uncomfortable.

And The Boy thinks that I, as a PhD student, am making him grey. I did back-hand the pile of my birthday cards off the table and onto the floor in front of him two days ago. I was raging against my unruly conference paper. It has been causing me trouble for weeks and I have no one to talk to about it. I didn't feel ashamed by my tantrum, but I do feel a bit bad that I am quickening The Boy's decay.

I had a long telephone conversation with one of my brothers recently. One by one, he listed our family members and his complaints, peppered, of course, with careful qualifications and some more generous remarks. I understood. He hadn't seen them in a while.

I had a friend, Kate, come over to play. She took the photograph of the two of us in our 50s party dresses in the bedroom next to where I work. I was a little bit scared.

A local man from the village with a big face and a hidden chin told me that as an Australian, and with Australia lower on the Olympic medal tally than Great Britain, I was a miserable peasant, a bad loser and without electricity. It made me think about some things.

So these are some fragments of my life and only glimpses. I have only been offered glimpses by them too.

I found this little gem from Eric G Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University:

To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.