Orts #696
These are all from A Widow's Story (2011) by Joyce Carol Oates (1938- )
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/books/review/Hulbert-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
. . . I am thinking of a line of Anne Sexton which the suicide-obsessed poet had adopted as a kind of mantra -- Live or die but don't spoil the world for others.
In this new — posthumous — phase of my life . . . epiphanies come to me frequently. Widowhood is the punishment for having been a wife.
Vicious reviews, opprobrium of all sorts are the writer's punishment for being a writer.
When you sign on to be a wife, you are signing on to being a widow one day, possibly. When you sign on to being a writer you are signing on to any and all responses to your work.
On shore, in a tangle of storm debris, & a lighted ferry or sailboat or cruise ship is pulling out -- on the shore you stand watching as the boat recedes — sparkling lights, music, voices — laughter. If you wave at the boat, or do not wave at the boat, it comes to the same thing: no one notices, and the boat is pulling out to sea.