Yesterday P. asked: “Do you think the children from Job’s second chance could actually be happy?” – Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A notebook, translated by Clare Cavanagh But then amid the helplessness of Lives and corrugated sewage, underneath the heavens’ cold and hatchbacked tabernacle, absolute, at night and then in the tubercular dawn, the Man who had been locked in Place, shocked by his loss of Face and Family, was loosed: and then the World donated to him twice what had been gone. His Children (whom he’d seen the fired pyres stripping of their nakedness and every woolly talisman) came back, came bringing groceries: and they said, this is what a bad trip feels like, we were never dead, you only thought we were: and though he had mislaid his Face in tumuli of boils, had dropped his Eyes in lozenge-bottles crouched behind the ziggurats of shipping boxes at the docks, screamed at Life’s fair unfairness, they beatified him, decorated him with Reassurances that tugged like ugly gold hoops at his ears. So in the End he was more blessed (which in some Tongues translates as wounded) than in the Beginning: but he cried I said, I said, I know you’re as dead as the oxen the asses the camels
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