The Inheritance of Loss

I've been trying not to do this too much since it was extremely indicative of my previous blog, but I'm going to bite the bullet since I think it's kind of indicative of my style in general and not to include the following (and I'm sure many posts to come) would mean a decision to omit a large part of what inspires me from my blog, which seems, you know, couterproductive and wrong.

So I'm reading this book called The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, a strikingly beautiful Indian-American woman. Her language is very poetic throughout the novel, and there are very many passages that have struck me profoundly, but there was one that I read today that I felt I had to share. The following passage is an observation by the author made after some of the characters discuss the relative virtues of different religions in their ideas of what ultimately means justice i.e. the afterlife or karma, etc.:

The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell.

This particular passage means something to me today because I have recently been carrying around a mountain of hurt on my shoulders as a result of the breakdown of what I considered an important relationship in my life. I saw it coming from a mile away, but I was desperately hoping that I would be proven wrong in this instance. The sheer scope of instances in which I was to blame for this situation is seemingly endless, but ultimately there was nothing I could have done to change the outcome.

And that is the most bitter pill to take.

In this particular situation, the crime perpetrated by two individuals against each other will never be judged by an impartial witness. There is no way to measure and balance out the damage that was done by each party over the long course of time.

The only truth I've been able to find is in silence. The more I talk and think and write about it, the more confusing it becomes for me, and it does not bring me peace.

The only thing I can do to relieve myself of this hell is to make the decision for it to end. But that brings with it another inherent burden. It will have been my choice. And once it is made, I don't think I can unmake it.

I know it's the love I can't bear to part with more than its object.