Innocence: a Novel
“I should have slept. This was my time for sleeping. But I couldn’t lie down and stay down. It just didn’t feel right. Lying in my hammock and closing my eyes, I felt as if sleep would be a kind of incarceration. I was too alive to sleep, more alive than I had felt since I had been a young boy living by day—and some nights—in the wild woods, determined not to bother my troubled mother in the little house on the mountain.
Sitting in Father’s armchair, I attempted to escape into fiction, but that ...didn’t work, either. Three different books failed to gather me into their stories. I couldn’t focus on the meaning of the sentences, and sometimes the words looked foreign to me, as if they were written with those symbols on the windowsill in Gwyneth’s bedroom.
I didn’t think it was love that made me restless, although in some way I did already love her. I knew what love felt like, for I had loved Father and, less powerfully, my mother. Love is absorbing, related to affection but stronger, full of appreciation for—and delight in—the other person, marked by a desire always to please and benefit her or him, always to smooth the loved one’s way through the roughness of the days and to do everything possible to make her or him feel profoundly valued.MoreLess
Sitting in Father’s armchair, I attempted to escape into fiction, but that ...didn’t work, either. Three different books failed to gather me into their stories. I couldn’t focus on the meaning of the sentences, and sometimes the words looked foreign to me, as if they were written with those symbols on the windowsill in Gwyneth’s bedroom.
I didn’t think it was love that made me restless, although in some way I did already love her. I knew what love felt like, for I had loved Father and, less powerfully, my mother. Love is absorbing, related to affection but stronger, full of appreciation for—and delight in—the other person, marked by a desire always to please and benefit her or him, always to smooth the loved one’s way through the roughness of the days and to do everything possible to make her or him feel profoundly valued.MoreLess
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