By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Author:Elizabeth Smart [Smart, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007375882
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

Remember also, when you hold your so vulnerable head between your hands, that what we are being punished for, and worse, what we are punishing for, is not just that sea of peace we achieve when you call me You Bitch, but the Cause. (The cause, my soul.)

For sometimes when this aspect, the warmth that swoons, has such a rich retinue, we say, We are too happy, we are too rich and strong. And then, overcome by guilt or shame to be so favoured, we waver and say, It is unfair that the weak and the unlucky ones suffer and we don’t.

But if you do me the wrong of thinking I am beautiful, that I have a million rescuers from despair, and therefore I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me. Therefore, how much greater my loss must be which takes away even what appears to be mine by nature, my power to endure and resist.

Remember I am not temptation to you, but everything is which inclines you away. Nor are you to me, but my entire goal. Sometimes you see this as clearly as I do now, for you say, ‘Do you think if I didn’t I could have …?’

But Pity like a beggar-child sidles up to you with beseeching palm and eyes more moving than beauty. And walking down Third Avenue you hear the mice squeak in the housewives’ traps.

Do you see me then as the too-successful one, like a colossus whose smug thighs rise obliviously out of sorrow? Or as the detestable all-female, who grabs and devours, invulnerable with greed?

Alas, these thoughts are your sins, your garments of shame, and not the blond-sapling boys with blue eyeshadow leaning amorously towards you in the printshop.

There are some who love Lucifer because he lost the battle with God. The devil had some justice on his side, and perhaps something was rotten in the state of heaven then. Don’t think I haven’t seen chipmunks’ tails abandoned on logs to save their lives, nor gnawed rabbits’ paws in traps mixed up with the steel.

When I hurry down the street it is not any game I hold in my mind and play with the passers by, but the shyness which keeps seamstresses nervously peering out of their badly-lit rooms, half hidden behind the drab lace, preferring to dream over their gas-jets and mild tea than submit to the rude investigations of the world. There are such, you know, and they treat their possessions gently, as if they were children or animals. But don’t think they are overlooked. Thousands of angels yearn over them, are even now embroidering them skirts, and getting ready to teach them the rumba.

Who weeps for the angels, though, or notices when they turn aside to stiffen their upper lips?

Not that I claim to be an angel, too. But I know that to be even gently bright and happy raises enemies.

Only remember: I am not the ease, but the end.

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