Motherhood
The physical act of moving into the realm of motherhood is portrayed through religious-inspired imagery that is also eminently visceral. Taken out of context, the following passage may not immediately strike one as being a description of the process of undergoing labor and delivering a new life into the world. But within context, this is the specificity of the action being so described. The “someone” refers to the mother and the torture is the often insanely prolonged physical pain of delivering that life. It is torture that unifies everyone on the planet.
“Someone has been tortured on my behalf. Someone has been tortured on your behalf. Someone in this world will always be suffering on your behalf. If it comes your time to suffer, just remember. Someone suffered for you. That is what taking on a cloak of human flesh is all about, the willingness to hurt for another human being.”
God’s Plan
Those who truly believe are utterly convinced beyond room for argument that if God exists, then by definition He has a plan. Assuming that is true, however, it is not necessarily a logical extension that the plan is in the best interest of the believers. If, as those true believers insist, pitiful man cannot possibly hope to even begin to understand the infinite complexity of God, then why should one automatically assume that His plan makes any sort of sense to our narrow focus:
“Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.”
Mortality
Poetic imagery conveys the beauty within the tragic. It has been said that every life is a tragedy because, like stage tragedies, it always ends with death. The imagery suggests that it is precisely that mortality—and, of essential significance, the constant awareness of that mortality—which endows humanity with the ability to see beauty in the world:
“I close my eyes and listen to the roar and clatter of the world as it rushes by. We are rushing too. The wind is whipping past us. We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.”
The Things Parents Do
Memories waft over the pregnant narrator and take her to some strange places with strange descriptive imagery of everyday things. One of which is the memory of a child overhearing the sounds of parental passion. The imagery hints at details perhaps best left unexplored and certainly best left unnarrated:
“I try not to think of how my parents are contending with the crisis; they have always had a hot sex life, and as a child I knew more about it than I wanted to. Glen and Sera didn’t believe in shutting up and although their bedroom is on the farthest end of the second floor, away from mine, our house is old and their warm kittenish cries, their weeping, and what sounded sometimes like hard work, even furniture moving or séance-table dancing, traveled through the ductwork.”
