Rest

Returning to Toni Morrison, of the rich language that makes you gasp in surprise and awe. And whose prose somehow always reminds you of Tracey Chapman and her songs of freedom and escape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orv_F2HV4gk

.............................................................................................

"She thinks she longs for rest, a carefree afternoon to decide suddenly to go the pictures, or just to sit with the birdcages and listen to the children play in the snow.

This notion of rest, it's attractive to her, but I don't think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn't like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor mornings free of flies and heat when the light is shy. No. Not at all.

They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don't know where from.

A neighbour returns a spool of thread she borrowed, and not just the thread, but the extra-long needle too, and both of them stand in the door frame a moment while the borrower repeats for the lender a funny conversation she had with the woman on the floor below; it is funny and they laugh - one loudly while holding her forehead, the other hard enough to hurt her stomach.

The lender closes the door, and later, still smiling, touches the lapel of her sweater to her eye to wipe traces of the laughter away then drops to the arm of the sofa the tears coming so fast she needs two hands to catch them...."

Page 17, 'Jazz' by Toni Morrison