1:03 p.m. 02 June 2002
I always look at those crosses by the side of the road. The ones that mean someone died there.
Sometimes they have flowers on them, but sometimes they're just a plain cross. Sometimes there are two crosses, because it was two people. And sometimes people have left things. Letters. A photograph. Or sometimes, a teddy bear.
They always surprise me, I think. It doesn't make sense almost, that someone should have died there. Right there. Right there was where the car crashed. Right there she died or he lay until the ambulance came, but by then it was too late.
I mean, it's just a stretch of road. Sometimes there's a curve or a hill -- something to show you what went wrong. But most of the time it's just highway. Or, sometimes, just a street. Maybe there was snow that night, or it suddenly started raining. Maybe someone was drunk. Maybe it was just an accident, and nothing you can even explain.
There is, after all, very little that distinguishes one piece of road from another. All of is just transit. It is not anything in itself. It is only something you use to get from one place to another. You are not there, you are passing through there, you are on your way home, you are visiting a friend, you are going to the store, you are going to a wedding. You are not associated in any lasting way with milepost 17 or 44 or just before the turn to Ruckersville or Stockton or Mammoth Caves.
And yet, right there, that spot that is nothing to you, that is only one of a process of spots on your way, someone else's way stopped forever. He or she did not finish the journey that night or day or morning. Instead, in a terrifying, sickening instant, in a moment that you cannot imagine because you have not yet come to it, the journey stopped.
They make me sad, of course, those crosses. Terribly sad. I don't like to think about people dying in car accidents. I don't like to think about people dying.
But they also make me notice. The thing I think about, even more than the sadness at death itself, is the idea that every instant, though it seems only to be a part of a larger process of movement from here to there, past to future, what I've done to what I'm going to do, is in fact a spot of its own. Every moment is a world to itself, and though most of them have nothing, externally, to distinguish them, they are all, in reality, their own everything.
I'm sorry this entry is so depressing. Maybe it's because I've only just noticed that the sky is bluest, not in the warm summer, but in winter, at the height of cold when days are so short.
Or maybe it has something to do with the hat I saw sitting in the middle of the road as I drove home from Charlottesville.
(Lost objects have the ability to make me sadder than almost anything else, short of actual tragedy. I inherited this from my mother. When I was small, she went to such great pains to make sure I did not lose one of my special animals or my blanket that I had a special travel version of my blanket (called blue cockie, as my blanket itself was called cockie) that went with us on errands, instead of the actual blanket. In fact, only half of it went with us, so that should the unthinkable happen and the blanket became lost, I would not only still have half left, it would only be blue cockie, and not the real thing, that had disappeared. When I saw Snow White for the first time, my greatest worry was not that the witch would get her, but that when she was running through the forest she had somehow lost the polka-dot bundle she started out with. She has it when she starts, but it does not appear at the dwarves' cottage. I worried about this so much I barely paid attention to the rest of the movie.)
I always look at those crosses by the side of the road. The ones that mean someone died there.
Sometimes they have flowers on them, but sometimes they're just a plain cross. Sometimes there are two crosses, because it was two people. And sometimes people have left things. Letters. A photograph. Or sometimes, a teddy bear.
They always surprise me, I think. It doesn't make sense almost, that someone should have died there. Right there. Right there was where the car crashed. Right there she died or he lay until the ambulance came, but by then it was too late.
I mean, it's just a stretch of road. Sometimes there's a curve or a hill -- something to show you what went wrong. But most of the time it's just highway. Or, sometimes, just a street. Maybe there was snow that night, or it suddenly started raining. Maybe someone was drunk. Maybe it was just an accident, and nothing you can even explain.
There is, after all, very little that distinguishes one piece of road from another. All of is just transit. It is not anything in itself. It is only something you use to get from one place to another. You are not there, you are passing through there, you are on your way home, you are visiting a friend, you are going to the store, you are going to a wedding. You are not associated in any lasting way with milepost 17 or 44 or just before the turn to Ruckersville or Stockton or Mammoth Caves.
And yet, right there, that spot that is nothing to you, that is only one of a process of spots on your way, someone else's way stopped forever. He or she did not finish the journey that night or day or morning. Instead, in a terrifying, sickening instant, in a moment that you cannot imagine because you have not yet come to it, the journey stopped.
They make me sad, of course, those crosses. Terribly sad. I don't like to think about people dying in car accidents. I don't like to think about people dying.
But they also make me notice. The thing I think about, even more than the sadness at death itself, is the idea that every instant, though it seems only to be a part of a larger process of movement from here to there, past to future, what I've done to what I'm going to do, is in fact a spot of its own. Every moment is a world to itself, and though most of them have nothing, externally, to distinguish them, they are all, in reality, their own everything.
I'm sorry this entry is so depressing. Maybe it's because I've only just noticed that the sky is bluest, not in the warm summer, but in winter, at the height of cold when days are so short.
Or maybe it has something to do with the hat I saw sitting in the middle of the road as I drove home from Charlottesville.
(Lost objects have the ability to make me sadder than almost anything else, short of actual tragedy. I inherited this from my mother. When I was small, she went to such great pains to make sure I did not lose one of my special animals or my blanket that I had a special travel version of my blanket (called blue cockie, as my blanket itself was called cockie) that went with us on errands, instead of the actual blanket. In fact, only half of it went with us, so that should the unthinkable happen and the blanket became lost, I would not only still have half left, it would only be blue cockie, and not the real thing, that had disappeared. When I saw Snow White for the first time, my greatest worry was not that the witch would get her, but that when she was running through the forest she had somehow lost the polka-dot bundle she started out with. She has it when she starts, but it does not appear at the dwarves' cottage. I worried about this so much I barely paid attention to the rest of the movie.)
Labels: death/mourning/corpses, liminality
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