The Blind Assassin 눈먼 암살자

Margaret Atwood 마거릿 애트우드

Be thankful for small mercies, Reenie would say.
Why should we be? said Laura. Why are they so small?

Where are we going? Towards the next day. It hasn't escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it's like love, or a certain kind of it.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?
At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs.

Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because ina mirror your own head it always cranked around over your shoulder.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later.

A note of promise, as the gardening column says; though even now, in late April, it snowed the other day - big white sloppy flakes, a freakish blizzard.

4월 말에 눈이 오는 캐나다

Why am I thinking about memory? It's not then yet, it's now. It's not over.

There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

Anyway, taken to its logical conclusions, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.

But there can be happy parts in between, she said. In between the birth and the death - can't there?

But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.

On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the plummet of the car from the bridge.

Should is a futile word. It's about what didn't happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

They never seem to get tired of it: plants have no memories, that's why. They can't remember how many times they've done all this before.

It's the end of the world every day, for someone.

If you knew what was going to happen. if you knew everything that was going to happen next - if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions - you'd be doomed.

It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.