Yesterday, I read Susan Minot’s Rapture, a book about what two people in an on again-off again relationship are thinking while engaged in a sexual act. Some people think it’s depressing, because the couple is clearly not in love, nor in a healthy relationship. I think it’s really well-written and true to life. Here are some excerpts:
“You couldn’t be sure which way it would go, the first time you touched someone. Either the person would be familiar and the way he held you would sort of take your breath away, or he would remain a stranger and though your breathing would be affected, the way he held you would be odd and unknown, like arriving in a foreign country and being hit with its smells, which are intoxicating but about which you remain uncertain. It was not the all-consuming feeling which comes when you arrive at a place you’ve known well, after being away a long time, so that some things are changed, giving you a new thrill, and since you see it with new eyes, it is both old and new, both familiar and strange.”
“Sometimes you got that feeling when you met someone - the horizon widened. Most of the time, after you got to know the person, the widening feeling went away. You got used to the person’s vista. But with Kay the feeling had lasted. In his better moments he could believe that with her, he might become the person he wanted to be.”
“He didn’t understand women. He’d only grown accustomed to expecting certain types of inexplicable behavior. For instance, if you told a woman she looked beautiful it immediately cheered her up, no matter how much she was ragging on you or how pissed off she might be… Or, he’d observed, women spent long periods of time exchanging obscure information with each other which, if you listened to what they were saying, you could not figure out the important part.”
“She left with his Great to see you ringing in her ears. She walked away, rattled. She felt as if God were watching her and testing her - not that she actually believed in God, it was more like a concerned third party - overseeing what was going on between her and Benjamin, watchful of her progress. She didn’t know exactly what she was expected to do, or what the test was, but instinct told her that walking away from him on her own was the beginning of passing it.”
“It gave a person a chill thinking about it, how much things could change between people. It only confirmed her impression that the bottom was constantly dropping out of human relations.”
“But powerful things usually contain complications and with complications come trouble, trouble of the sort people spend their whole lives avoiding, or, if they were like Kay and most of the human race, looking for.”
“Not that she knew precisely what she needed, but she knew what she was drawn to, and those things were not always in her practical best interest. They were the things which made her feel… Love, as far as she could see, had little to do with reason and practicality, unless you were lucky and happened to be built that way.”
“No matter how grounded you were in the present, your body could sent you into the past. Even if all feeling was gone and the person no longer held the tiniest glimmer of fascination, your body could still react and you’d feel it, like the vibration of an old land mine, long forgotten, being tripped and exploding miles away.”
“Knowing more of life made your feelings more dense. Those feelings had survived life’s onslaught. The more jaded and protective and disillusioned you became with age, the bigger love would have to be to generate life out of those ruins.”
I’ve gotta look into more Minot. Rapture was my first.