First Love, Last Rites free essay sample

He described involved experiments outside his own stables to determine the compressibility of horse dung, which he managed to express mathematically. It was all pure theory, of course. His results rested on the assumption that no dung would be shovelled aside in the fifty years to come. Very likely it was M who talked my great-grandfather out of the project. One morning, after a long dark night of Maisies nightmares, we were lying side by side in bed and I said, What is it you really want? Why dont you go back to your job? These long walks, all this analysis, sitting around the house, lying in bed all morning, the Tarot pack, the nightmares .. . what is it you want? And she said, I want to get my head straight, which she had said many times before.I said, Your head, your mind, its not like a hotel kitchen, you know, you cant throw stuff out like old tin cans. We will write a custom essay sample on First Love, Last Rites or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Its more like a river than a place, moving and changing all the time. You cant make rivers flow straight. Dont go through all that again, she said. Im not trying to make rivers flow straight, Im trying to get my head straight. Youve got to do something, I told her. You cant do nothing. Why not go back to your job? You didnt have nightmares when you were working. You were never so unhappy when you were working. Ive got to stand back from all that, she said. Im not sure what any of it means. Fashion, I said, its all fashion. Fashionable metaphors, fashionable reading, fashionable malaise. What do you care about Jung, for example? Youve read twelve pages in a month. Dont go on, she pleaded, you know it leads nowhere. But I went on. Youve never been anywhere, I told her, youve never done anything. Youre a nice girl without even the blessing of an unhappy childhood. Your sentimental Buddhism, this junk-shop mysticism, joss-stick therapy, magazine astrology . .. none of it is yours, youve worked none of it out for yourself. You fell into it, you fell into a swamp of respectable intuitions. You havent the originality or passion to intuit anything yourself beyond your own unhappiness.Why are you filling your mind with other peoples mystic banalities and giving your self nightmares? I got out of bed, opened the curtains and began to get dressed. You talk like this was a fiction seminar, Maisie said. Why are you trying to make things worse for me? Selfpity began to well up from inside her, but she fought it down. When you are talking, she went on, I can feel myself, you know, being screwed up like a piece of paper. Perhaps we are in a fiction seminar, I said grimly. Maisie sat up in bed staring at her lap.