Oyster Love Quotes

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question.../ Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' / Let us go and make our visit"' 'I'm in love with you,' he said quietly.

We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew.

In the sea of my emotions, his presence is like a pearl in the oyster. Very hard to locate, yet very precious and still beautiful.

Miles was still mourning the loss of his Romantic Plan. 'There was going to be champagne, and oysters, and you' -- he held out both hands as though shifting a piece of furniture -- 'were going to be sitting there, and I was going to get down on one knee, and...and...

Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty. Before I was reduced to singsong, I saw all kinds of mating. Most are two-night stands trying to last a season. Some, the riptide ones, claim exclusive right to the real name, even though everybody drowns in its wake. People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time. While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from greed to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests. I run too, finally. I say finally because I do like a good storm. I would be one of those people in the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: ‘Get moving!

But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz--God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable name and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.

I'm becoming more a vessel of memories than a person it's a myth / that love lives in the heart it lives in the throat we push it out / when we speak when we gasp we take a little for ourselves / in books love can be war-ending a soldier drops his sword / to lie forking oysters into his enemy's mouth in life we hold love up to the light / to marvel at its impotence

We girls aren't supposed to fall for the good boys.We are supposed to like a bit of grit in our oyster.That's how you get a pearl, after all.

At certain times I have no race. I am me. I belong to no race or time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. I have a strong suspicion, but I can't be sure, that much that passes for constant love is a golded-up moment walking in its sleep. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me. There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Still perfect,” he said. “Read to me.” “This isn’t really a poem to read aloud when you are sitting next to your sleeping mother. It has, like, sodomy and angel dust in it,” I said. “You just named two of my favorite pastimes,” he said. “Okay, read me something else then?” “Um,” I said. “I don’t have anything else?” “That’s too bad. I am so in the mood for poetry. Do you have anything memorized?” “‘Let us go then, you and I,’” I started nervously, “‘When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.’” “Slower,” he said. I felt bashful, like I had when I’d first told him of An Imperial Affliction. “Um, okay. Okay. ‘Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . / Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” / Let us go and make our visit.’” “I’m in love with you,” he said quietly. “Augustus,” I said. “I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.” “Augustus,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn’t say it back. I

what I did not know - I was a young man - is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.

In grave danger of suffocation, the mermaid peeled away from him and emitted a sonar wail that woke drowned sailors from their oyster beds.

There is lovemaking that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from the Thrift-E Mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all nine hundred taste buds to carol from the tongue, but in the end, the sugars, the additives, the empty calories clog arteries, disrupt cells, generate fat, and rot teeth. Even potentially nourishing foods can be improperly prepared. There are wrong combinations and improper preparations in sex as well. Yes, one must prepare for a fuck--the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power. And even that won't work if the ingredients are poorly matched: oysters are delectable, so are strawberries, but mashed together ... (?!) Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health-food nuts use cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes--only a dullard would hang such a millstone around the nibbled neck of a lay--but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one's palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure--there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-months affairs in Paris--but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; and honest caring, however singled by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison.

…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.

Obviously, if you don’t love life, you can’t enjoy an oyster.

The Victorian happy ending– a vision of a huge loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters.

Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.

MAN 1: I’m hungry. MAN 2: Me too. Hey, I found a rock with a snot in it. I was thinking of eating it. MAN 1: Um, okay. Go ahead. MAN 2: (slurps up the oyster) MAN 1: What does it taste like? MAN 2: Pneumonia.

Linger now with me, thou Beauty, On the sharp archaic shore. Surely 'tis a wastrel's duty And the gods could ask no more. If thou lingerest when I linger, If thou tread'st the stones I tread, Thou wilt stay my spirit's hunger And dispel the dreams I dread. Come thou, love, my own, my only, Through the battlements of Groan; Lingering becomes so lonely When one lingers on one's own. I have lingered in the cloisters Of the Northern Wing at night, As the sky unclasped its oysters On the midnight pearls of light; For the long remorseless shadows Chilled me with exquisite fear. I have lingered in cold meadows Through a month of rain, my dear. Come, my Love, my sweet, my Only, Through the parapets of Groan. Lingering can be very lonely When one lingers on one's own. In dark alcoves I have lingered Conscious of dead dynasties; I have lingered in blue cellars And in hollow trunks of trees. Many a traveler through moonlight Passing by a winding stair Or a cold and crumbling archway Has been shocked to see me there. I have longed for thee, my Only, Hark! the footsteps of the Groan! Lingering is so very lonely When one lingers all alone. Will thou come with me, and linger? And discourse with me of those Secret things the mystic finger Points to, but will not disclose? When I'm all alone, my glory Always fades, because I find Being lonely drives the splendour Of my vision from my mind. Come, oh, come, my own! my Only! Through the Gormenghast of Groan. Lingering has become so lonely As I linger all alone!

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

It's funny. We meet hundreds of people. We stop to remember them sometimes and they're so far away and we're not a part of them anymore. Makes you realise how important it is to be a part of someone. And stay that way with them. And we have visions of going out into the open world and treating it as our oyster... but it takes a small, mindful moment to make us realise that doesn't really mean anything when you don't have someone to call home.

I love you so much that I'm glad I never met you.

Even a grain of sand united with an oyster can make a pearl.

In early cultures, it was thought pearls were born when a single raindrop fell from the heavens and became the heart of the oyster. For me, ye have become the pearl, the beat of me heart. The sapphires and emeralds signify me tartan and how I will always surround ye with love, Creigh.

I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster, but I’ll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool. One woman is fair, yet I am well; another is wise, yet I am well; another virtuous, yet I am well; but till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace. Rich she shall be, that’s certain; wise, or I’ll none; virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her; fair, or I’ll ever look on her; mild, or come not near me; noble, or not I for an angel; of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what color it please God. Ha! The Prince and Monsieur Love! I will hide me in the arbor.

Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the safe protectorate of his soft, uncritical maleness, I never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity, and I had no way of honoring, of giving small voice to the praise of such natural innocence, such a generous simplicity. Now I know that a part of me would like to have traveled the world as he traveled it, a jester of burning faith, a fool and a forest prince brimming with the love of God. I would like to walk his southern world, thanking God for oysters and porpoises, praising God for birdsongs and sheet lightning, and seeing God reflected in pools of creekwater and the eyes of stray cats. I would like to have talked to yard dogs and tanagers as if they were my friends and fellow travelers along the sun-tortured highways, intoxicated with a love of God, swollen with charity like a rainbow, in the thoughtless mingling of its hues, connecting two distant fields in its glorious arc. I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and a tongue fluent only in praise.

While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from green to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind.

She sensed older presences as she walked. She knew by a cold stirring that here they had made their fires, and here their cattle had grazed, and here they ate periwinkles and oysters from the shell, and they had this burning salt on their lips, and felt this old rain, and made their cries of love and war, and roamed in hordes; their little kingdoms here were settled, and disassembled; by night, in our valley, the wolves had bayed.

Often on the menu, oysters will be listed as “oysters on the half shell.” As opposed to what? “In a Kleenex?” Even the way you are supposed to eat an oyster indicates something counterintuitive. “Squeeze some lemon on it, a dab of hot sauce, throw the oyster down the back of your throat, take a shot of vodka, and try to forget you just ate snot from a rock.” That is not how you eat something. That is how you overdose on sleeping pills.

What the Motorcycle Said Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackerty-am-m, OM, AM: All-r-r-room, r-r-ram, ala-bas-ter- Am, the world’s my oyster. I hate plastic, wear it black and slick, hate hardhats, wear one on my head, That’s what the motorcycle said. Passed phonies in Fords, knockede down billboards, landed On the other side of The Gap, and Whee, bypassed history. When I was born (The Past), baby knew best. They shook when I bawled, took Freud’s path, threw away their wrath. R-r-rackety-am-m. Am. War, rhyme, soap, meat, marriage, the Phantom Jet are sh*t, and like that. Hate pompousness, punishment, patience, am into Love, hate middle-class moneymakers, live on Dad, that’s what the motorcycle said. Br-r-r-am-m-m. It’s Nowsville, man. Passed Oldies, Uglies, Straighties, Honkies. I’ll never be mean, tired, or unsexy. Passed cigarette suckers, souses, mother-fuckers, losers, went back to Nature and found how to get VD, stoned. Passed a cow, too fast to hear her moo, “I rolled our leaves of grass into one ball. I am the grassy All.” Br-r-r-am-m-m, rackety-am-m, OM, Am: All-gr-r-rin, oooohgah, gl-l-utton- Am, the world’s my smilebutton.

Now tell me, briefly, what the word ‘homosexuality’ means to you, in your own words." "Love flowers pearl, of delighted arms. Warm and water. Melting of vanilla wafer in the pants. Pink petal roses trembling overdew on the lips, soft and juicy fruit. No teeth. No nasty spit. Lips chewing oysters without grimy sand or whiskers. Pastry. Gingerbread. Warm, sweet bread. Cinnamon toast poetry. Justice equality higher wages. Independent angel song. It means I can do what I want.

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them... “When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.

He is the same soul. You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can't. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. 'God loves you' is the only possible sentence! So it's love you must follow to the heart of your father-in-law. Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim. Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect. Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave.

Mr. Severin, may I ask something personal?" "Of course." "Why did you offer to be my oyster?" A hot blush climbed her face. "Is it because I'm pretty?" His head lifted. "Partly," he admitted without a hint of shame. "But I also liked what you said- that you never nag or slam doors, and you're not looking for love. I'm not either." He paused, his vibrant gaze holding hers. "I think we would be a good match." "I didn't mean I don't want love," Cassandra protested. "I only meant I'd be willing to let love grow in time. To be clear, I want a husband who could also love me back." Mr. Severin took his time about replying. "What if you had a husband who, although not handsome, was not altogether bad-looking and happened to be very rich? What if he were kind and considerate, and gave you whatever you asked for- mansions, jewels, trips abroad, your own private yacht and luxury railway carriage? What if he were exceptionally good at..." He paused, appearing to think better of what he'd been about to say. "What if he were your protector and friend? Would it really matter so much if he couldn't love you?" "Why couldn't he?" Cassandra asked, intrigued and perturbed. "Is he missing a heart altogether?" "No, he has one, but it's never worked that way.

I told her about the best and the worst. The slow and sleepy places where weekdays rolled past like weekends and Mondays didn’t matter. Battered shacks perched on cliffs overlooking the endless, rumpled sea. Afternoons spent waiting on the docks, swinging my legs off a pier until boats rolled in with crates full of oysters and crayfish still gasping. Pulling fishhooks out of my feet because I never wore shoes, playing with other kids whose names I never knew. Those were the unforgettable summers. There were outback towns where you couldn’t see the roads for red dust, grids of streets with wandering dogs and children who ran wild and swam naked in creeks. I remembered climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if you pressed your ear to them. Boomboom-boomboom. Dreamy nights sleeping by the campfire and waking up covered in fine ash, as if I’d slept through a nuclear holocaust. We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun.

I didn't grow up feeling smart and special, the world my oyster, born with a silver shucker in my hand. No one works harder than you, that's the way Zell and Juwon liked to put it. Everything I have is because I was the dutiful worker bee or because I have no other things to distract me, like girlfriends or wives, like mewling kids or family dogs or a love of weekend brunches and fantasy football, or a single, sad hobby, like solitaire or the Sunday jumble. I have this.

There is something magical about young love, when you still think that the world is your oyster and you have your whole life ahead of you.

Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.

it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. HOWEVER, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world . .

Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn’t have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do. There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time’s power even over this—which, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments’ are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge—no, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence—if that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert. But the still life resides in absolute silence. Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard. But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver. These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time. Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life—this knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife—and, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented. These things exist—if indeed they are still around at all—in time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife’s pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said?

[The party] was held at her cousin's house and it lasted for three days. For the duration, they all slept only from dawn to noon and lived on little but oysters and champagne and pastry. Each evening there was music and dancing, and then late in the nights, under a moon growing to full, they went out on the slow water in rowing boats. It was a strange time of war fever, and even young men previously considered dull and charmless suddenly acquired an aura of glamour shimmering about them, for they all suspected that shortly many of them would be dead. During those brief days and nights, any man that wished might become somebody's darling.

— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

Still, this moment belongs to the two of them, Mom and this handsome stranger. He reaches the passenger side door and stares down at her with steely violet eyes-down at my mother who never cries, down at my mother who’s now bawling like a spanked child-his face contorted in a rainbow of so many emotions, some that I can’t even name. Then Grom the Triton king sinks to his knees in front of her, and a single tear spills down his face. “Nalia,” he whispers. And then my mother slaps him. It’s not the kind of slap you get for talking back. It’s not the kind of punch she dealt Galen and Toraf in our kitchen. It’s the kind of slap a woman gives a man when he’s hurt her deeply. And Grom accepts it with grace. “I looked for you,” she shouts, even though he’s inches from her. Slowly, as if in a show of peace, he takes the hand that slapped him and sandwiches it between his own. He seems to revel in the feel of her touch. His face is pure tenderness, his voice like a massage to the nerves. “And I looked for you.” “Your pulse was gone,” she insists. By now she chokes back sobs between words. She’s fighting for control. I’ve never seen my mother fight for control. “As was yours.” I realize Grom knows what not to say, what not to do to provoke her. He is the complete opposite of her, or maybe just a completion of her. Her eyes focus on his wrist, and tears slip down her face, leaving faint trails of mascara on her cheeks. He smiles and slowly pulls his hand away. I think he’s going to show her the bracelet he’s wearing, but instead he rips it off his wrist and holds it out for her inspection. From where I’m standing it looks like a single black ball tied to some sort of string. By my mom’s expression, this black ball has meaning. So much meaning that I think she’s forgotten to breathe. “My pearl,” she whispers. “I thought I’d lost it.” He encloses it in her hand. “This isn’t your pearl, love. That one was lost in the explosion with you. For almost an entire season, I scoured the oyster beds, looking for another one that would do. I don’t know why, but I thought maybe if I found another perfect pearl, I would somehow find you, too. When I found this though, it didn’t bring me the peace I’d hoped for. But I couldn’t bring myself to discard it. I’ve worn it on my wrist ever since.” This is all it takes for my mom to throw herself into his arms, bringing Rachel partially with her. Even so, it’s probably the most moving moment I’ve ever encountered in my eighteen years. Or at least it would be, if my mom weren’t clinging to a man who is not my dad.

To think through things, that is the still life painter’s work - and the poet’s. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world. We require, again and again, these demonstrations. (p10)

Yesterday I walked to Clerkenwell in the morning and stood by the iron grate where the Fleet flows, and listened, and imagined I heard the waters of all the rivers I have known - the head of the Fleet at Hampstead where I played when I was young, and the wide Thames, and the Blackwater, with its secrets that were hardly worth keeping. Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and the shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, something joined. The sun on my back through the window is warm and I hear a chaffinch singing. I am torn and I am mended - I want everything and need nothing - I love you and I am content without you.

Jun Do was thinking about all the popular definitions of love, that it was a pair of bare hands clasping an ember to keep it alive, that it was a pearl that shines forever, even in the belly of the eel that eats the oyster, that love was a bear that feeds you honey from its claws.

They always told me that a woman's soul emerged only in bed, her sex anointed by the man. Before him, my mother hinted, our sex most resembled an oyster nourished in salt water, far from the captive reality of earth ["I Love My Husband," Landscapes of a New Land, Marjorie Agosin, editor].

a philosopher, said to the bishop: “But just take a good look at the world; it’s the war of each against all; might is right. Your love one another is nonsense.” “Ah, well,” replied Monseigneur Bienvenu without arguing, “if it’s nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it like a pearl in an oyster.

Breaketh Thy oyster shell of silence, as Love shalt rise in its effulgence limpid pure tenderness to quench the spirit of Thy mind, as the fervent sublime oyster of Thy Beloved soul shalt submerge in the depth of Attainment in the Ocean of Divine Love to rescue pure Hearts to form a Blissed Pearl Of Divine Unity.

I felt bashful, like I had when I'd first told him of An Imperial Affliction. "Um, okay. Okay. 'Let us go, trough certain half-deserted streets,/ The muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:/ Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent/ To lead you to an overwhelming question../Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"/ Let us go and make our visit" "I'm in love with you," he said quietly. "Augustus," I said. "I am, " he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you." "Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this wierdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say it back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

What I did not know—I was a young man—is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don’t notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.

What I did not know-I was a young man- is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand.

Who are you? She asked silently, as she laid away the collector's quotations, his drawings, his scraps of famous poetry: "Come live with me and be my love..." interleaved with menus: 'oysters, fish stew, tortoise in its shell, bread from the oven, honey from the honeycomb.' The books were unsplattered but much fingered, their pages soft with turning and re-turning, like collections of old fairy tales. Often Jess thought of Rapunzel and golden apples and enchanted gardens. She thought of Ovid, and Dante, and Cervantes, and the Pre-Raphaelites, for sometimes McClintock pictured his beloved eating, and sometimes sleeping in fields of poppies, and once throned like Persephone, with strawberry vines entwined in her long hair.

With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unraveling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor’s pocket. He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a peal: so he would have to cover the doctor. He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself, though originally brought on by no will of his own.

Aphrodite then promised Zeus that as soon as the girdle could be removed, she would reserve her flower for him. And she told him that her flower, as Nerites had advised her, was like a lovely oyster & she hoped that he liked oysters. And she told him that that was all that she had to give him in return for his seed. And she hoped that he would swallow her flower just as she swallowed his seed.

Five Poems" 1 Well now, hold on maybe I won't go to sleep at all and it'll be a beautiful white night or else I'll collapse completely from nerves and be calm as a rug or a bottle of pills or suddenly I'll be off Montauk swimming and loving it and not caring where 2 an invitation to lunch HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT? when I only have 16 cents and 2 packages of yoghurt there's a lesson in that, isn't there like in Chinese poetry when a leaf falls? hold off on the yoghurt till the very last, when everything may improve 3 at the Rond-Point they were eating an oyster, but here we were dropping by sculptures and seeing some paintings and the smasheroo-grates of Cadoret and music by Varese, too well Adolph Gottlieb I guess you are the hero of this day along with venison and Bill I'll sleep on the yoghurt and dream of the Persian Gulf 4 which I did it was wonderful to be in bed again and the knock on my door for once signified "hi there" and on the deafening walk through the ghettos where bombs have gone off lately left by subway violators I knew why I love taxis, yes subways are only fun when you're feeling sexy and who feels sexy after The Blue Angel well maybe a little bit 5 I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?

Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, and something joined. I am torn and I am mended - I want everything and need nothing - I love you and I am content without you. Even so, come quickly!

Not all at once, but gradually, over the months, another revelation came to me: None of that other stuff, much as I'd loved it, was what made a marriage. Not restaurant dinners or romantic vacations. Not walks on the beach or visits to wine country in the Boxster. Not oysters and martinis or moonlight over the Bay Bridge." "This was a marriage. As uncomfortable and inconvenient and devastating as it might be to live as we did now, we inhabited this place together.

People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time. While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from green to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests. I run too, finally. I say finally because I do like a good storm. I would be one of those people on the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: “Get moving!

the oysterer’s daughter, believing all that had happened to be the Devil’s curse for her inversion, wallowed in darkness and misery, drinking the blood of vermin, and praying to a god who wouldn’t answer for a death that wouldn’t come.” I rolled over to face her. “That’s really sad. What happened next?” “She got over it.” “Is that it?” I caught the glint of Julian’s teeth as she smiled. “Yep.” “I thought you were going to be redeemed by the love of a good woman.” “There’s still time, sweeting.

A sharp twist of grief pulled at my heart. I sucked in a deep breath of marsh air, briny and moist, trying to clear my head. I loved who I’d become. I did. Almost as much as I hated the old me. But not, I suddenly realized, all of the old me. I missed the girl who’d known these secret alleyways into the marshes and who could recognize the sounds of the different bird and open an oyster faster than anyone she knew. But I’d gotten rid of her along with the rest of me, and the grief I felt was raw and open.

My life began by flickering out. It may sound strange but it is so. From the very first moment I became conscious of myself, I felt that I was already flickering out. I began to flicker out over the writing of official papers at the office; I went on flickering out when I read truths in books which I did not know how to apply in life, when I sat with friends listening to rumours, gossip, jeering, spiteful, cold, and empty chatter, and watching friendships kept up by meetings that were without aim or affection; I was flickering out and wasting my energies with Minna on whom I spent more than half of my income, imagining that I loved her; I was flickering out when I walked idly and dejectedly along Nevsky Avenue among people in raccoon coats and beaver collars – at parties, on reception days, where I was welcomed with open arms as a fairly eligible young man; I was flickering out and wasting my life and mind on trifles moving from town to some country house, and from the country house to Gorokhovaya, fixing the arrival of spring by the fact that lobsters and oysters had appeared in the shops, of autumn and winter by the special visiting days, of summer by the fêtes, and life in general by lazy and comfortable somnolence like the rest. ... Even ambition – what was it wasted on? To order clothes at a famous tailor's? To get an invitation to a famous house? To shake hands with Prince P.? And ambition is the salt of life! Where has it gone to? Either I have not understood this sort of life or it is utterly worthless; but I did not know of a better one. No one showed it to me.

And my arm, where Tessina had touched me... I raised it to my mouth, kissed the cloth of my sleeve. And there, jumping from the weave to my lips, a taste. Saffron- of course: what else would she be? A flavor that takes the lives of ten thousand lovely flowers. As it had done all those years ago, the taste rose again on my tongue as a ravishing, barbarian palace of domes and spires. Tessina. There she was, all of her: salt, the crystals that grow on oyster shells that have dried out in the sun; violets; lemon leaves; nutmeg; myrrh.

Though thou pour the ocean into thy pitcher, It can hold no more than one day's store. The pitcher of the desire of the covetous never fills, The oyster-shell fills not with pearls till it is content; Only he whose garment is rent by the violence of love Is wholly pure from covetousness and sin. Hail to thee, then, O LOVE, sweet madness! Thou who healest all our infirmities! Who art the physician of our pride and self-conceit! Who art our Plato and our Galen! Love exalts our earthly bodies to heaven, And makes the very hills to dance with joy!

Pray don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He's not a rough diamond - a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man... and he'd crush you like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge. I know he couldn't love a Linton; and yet he'd be quite capable of marrying your fortune and expectations. Avarice is growing with him a besetting sin. There's my picture; and I'm his friend - so much so, that had he thought seriously to catch you, I should, perhaps, have held my tongue, and let you fall into his trap.

I have lingered in the cloisters Of the Northern wing at night, As the sky unclasped its oysters On the midnight pearls of light. For the long remorseless shadows Chilled me with exquisite fear. I have lingered in cold meadows Through a month of rain, my dear. Come my Love, my sweet, my Only, Through the parapets of Groan. Lingering can be very lonely When one lingers on one’s own. In dark alcoves I have lingered Conscious of dead dynasties. I have lingered in blue cellars And in hollow trunks of trees, Many a traveller through moonlight Passing by a winding stair Or a cold and crumbling archway Has been shocked to see me there.

In the summer, as the heavy moths beat their powdery wings against his window screen, he wrote to her about the island, describing how the berry bushes were laden with fruit, and where the most succulent oysters could be found, and the way the bioluminescence lit the lapping waves and filled the ocean with twinkling planktonic forms that mirrored the stars in the sky. He translated the vast, wild, Pacific Rim ecosystem into poetry and pixels, transmitting them all the way to her small monitor in Manhattan, where she waited, leaning into the screen, eagerly reading each word with her heart in her throat, because by then she was deeply in love.

We are like those oysters in many ways...Irritants, or foreign objects, infiltrate our lives in the form of bad choices, jealousy, fear, deep loss, and countless other challenges I could name. We choose how to handle things that come, either by rallying our strength and faith and finding a way to go on, or by giving into the pressure and giving up. When we choose to stand up inside and protect our spirits, our hearts, and the essence of who we are, we produce a substance similar to what the oyster produces to form the layers of the pearl. In us, it's called character, integrity, grace, courage, and the ability to love ourselves and others, with no strings attached.

He is our cousin, cousin; but 'tis doubt, When time shall call him home from banishment, Whether our kinsman come to see his friends. Ourself, and Bushy, Bagot here, and Green, Observ'd his courtship to the common people; How he did seem to dive into their hearts With humble and familiar courtesy; What reverence he did throw away on slaves, Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles And patient underbearing of his fortune, As 'twere to banish their affects with him. Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench; A brace of draymen bid God speed him well And had the tribute of his supple knee, With 'Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends'; As were our England in reversion his, And he our subjects' next degree in hope.

And when Aphrodite was told about Cupid`s rapid progress, she asked Zeus whether he would take her other son, Hymen, along too, since Hymen was already twenty-one & was about to be appointed as the God of Marriage, but knew precious little about love & sex, let alone, marriage. And thus Zeus took Hymen along too on his oyster hunt. But the Nymphs did not like Hymen. They shrieked & ran in all directions at his approach. But Hymen turned out to be a worthy oyster hunter. He caught the Nymphs easily enough & after catching them, he fed them with wine which his father, the God of Wine, made. And thus drugged, he harvested their oysters painlessly. And this was how all virgin Nymphs & girls got their oysters named after him, the God of Marriage.

A misty vision of Francesca gazed down at me from a corner of the window. She gave me her wicked-sweet smile and the stars sparked in her pale hair. I wanted to call to her, but I had no voice. I smelled the mixed scents of her, and I imagined the lush, tropical feast I'd prepare for her on our wedding night. I'd slip raw oysters between her lips. We'd share ripe figs and plump, dewy cherries. I'd offer her sweetmeats and honeyed milk, blood oranges peeled and ready, salty artichokes stripped down to the heart. I'd pry open a lobster shell and feed her tender morsels of meat, slowly, slowly. The flavors would mingle and mount and burst inside us like soft explosions. I wanted to believe it would all be possible. I imagined her staring into my eyes while she dragged a buttered artichoke leaf between her teeth and sucked on the flesh. It was good. I rode through the long, lovely night on wave upon wave of pleasure, smelling her, tasting her, touching her... I heard myself moan, and in that fierce embrace, I believed.

But I don't know anyone who has an easy life forever. Everyone I know gets their heart broken sometime, by something. The question is not, will my life be easy or will my heart break? But rather, when my heart breaks, will I choose to grow? Sometimes in the moments of the most searing pain, we think we don't have a choice. But we do. It's in those moments that we make the most important choice: grow or give up. It's easy to want to give up under the weight of what we're carrying. It seems sometimes like the only possible choice. But there's always, always, always another choice, and transformation is waiting for us just beyond that choice. This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us. An oyster, a sliver of moon, one new bud on a black branch, a perfect tender shoot of asparagus, fighting up through the dirt for the spring sun. New life and new beauty are all around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be seen. I'm coming to think there are at least two kinds of pain. There's the anxiety and fear I felt when we couldn't sell our house. And then there's the sadness I felt when I lost the baby or when my grandma passed away. Very different kinds of pain. The first kind, I think, is the king that invites us to grow. The second kind is the kind that invites us to mourn. God's not trying to teach me a lesson through my grandma's death. I wasn't supposed to love her less so the loss hurt less acutely, I'm not supposed to feel less strongly about the horror of death and dying. When we lose someone we love, when a dear friend moves away, when illness invades, it's right to mourn. It's right to feel deep, wrenching sadness. But then there's the other kind of pain, that first kind. My friend Brian says that the heart of all human conflict is the phrase "I'm not getting what I want." When you're totally honest about the pain, what's at the center? Could it be that you're not getting what you want? You're getting an invitation to grow, I think, as unwelcome as it may be. It's sloppy theology to think that all suffering is good for us, or that it's a result of sin. All suffering can be used for good, over time, after mourning and healing, by God's graciousness. But sometimes it's just plain loss, not because you needed to grow, not because life or God or anything is teaching you any kind of lesson. The trick is knowing the difference between the two.

Soon, things were heating up in the kitchen. The first course was a variation on a French recipe that had been around since Escoffier, Baccala Brandade. Angelina created a silky forcemeat with milk, codfish, olive oil, pepper, and slow-roasted garlic, a drizzle of lemon juice, and a shower of fresh parsley, then served it as a dip with sliced sourdough and warmed pita-bread wedges, paired with glasses of bubbly Prosecco. The second course had been a favorite of her mother's called Angels on Horseback- freshly shucked oysters, wrapped in thin slices of prosciutto, then broiled on slices of herb-buttered bread. When the oysters cooked, they curled up to resemble tiny angels' wings. Angelina accented the freshness of the oyster with a dab of anchovy paste and wasabi on each hors d'oeuvre. She'd loved the Angels since she was a little girl; they were a heavenly mouthful. This was followed by a Caesar salad topped with hot, batter-dipped, deep-fried smelts. Angelina's father used to crunch his way through the small, silvery fish like French fries. Tonight, Angelina arranged them artfully around mounds of Caesar salad on each plate and ushered them out the door. For the fifth course, Angelina had prepared a big pot of her Mediterranean Clam Soup the night before, a lighter version of Manhattan clam chowder. The last two courses were Parmesan-Stuffed Poached Calamari over Linguine in Red Sauce, and the piece de resistance, Broiled Flounder with a Coriander Reduction.

COUNT. What’s to stop you taking her with you to London? FIGARO. A man who was married and had to be away so much? I’d never hear the end of it. COUNT. But with your qualities and brains you could climb the ladder and end up with an important government post one of these days. FIGARO. Brains? Climb the ladder? Your Lordship must think I’m stupid. Second-rate and grovelling, that’s the thing to be, and then the world’s your oyster. COUNT. All you’d have to do is take a few lessons in politics from me. FIGARO. I know what politics is. COUNT. Like you know the key to the English language? FIGARO. Not that it’s anything to boast about. It means pretending you don’t know what you do know and knowing what you don’t, listening to what you don’t understand and not hearing what you do, and especially, claiming you can do more than you have the ability to deliver. More often that not, it means making a great secret of the fact that there are no secrets; locking yourself in your inner sanctum where you sharpen pens and give the impression of being profound and wise, whereas you are, as they say, hollow and shallow; playing a role well or badly; sending spies everywhere and rewarding the traitors; tampering with seals, intercepting letters, and trying to dignify your sordid means by stressing your glorious ends. That’s all there is to politics, and you can have me shot if it’s not. COUNT. But what you’ve defined is intrigue. FIGARO. Call it politics, intrigue, whatever you want. But since to me the two things are as alike as peas in a pod, I say good luck to whoever has anything to do with either. ‘Truly, I love my sweetheart more’, as old King Henry’s song goes.

In the half darkness, piles of fish rose on either side of him, and the pungent stink of fish guts assaulted his nostrils. On his left hung a whole tuna, its side notched to the spine to show the quality of the flesh. On his right a pile of huge pesce spada, swordfish, lay tumbled together in a crate, their swords protruding lethally to catch the legs of unwary passersby. And on a long marble slab in front of him, on a heap of crushed ice dotted here and there with bright yellow lemons, where the shellfish and smaller fry. There were ricco di mare---sea urchins---in abundance, and oysters, too, but there were also more exotic delicacies---polpi, octopus; aragosti, clawless crayfish; datteri di mare, sea dates; and grancevole, soft-shelled spider crabs, still alive and kept in a bucket to prevent them from making their escape. Bruno also recognized tartufo di mare, the so-called sea truffle, and, right at the back, an even greater prize: a heap of gleaming cicale. Cicale are a cross between a large prawn and a small lobster, with long, slender front claws. Traditionally, they are eaten on the harbor front, fresh from the boat. First their backs are split open. Then they are marinated for an hour or so in olive oil, bread crumbs, salt, and plenty of black pepper, before being grilled over very hot embers. When you have pulled them from the embers with your fingers, you spread the charred, butterfly-shaped shell open and guzzle the meat col bacio----"with a kiss," leaving you with a glistening mustache of smoky olive oil, greasy fingers, and a tingling tongue from licking the last peppery crevices of the shell. Bruno asked politely if he could handle some of the produce. The old man in charge of the display waved him on. He would have expected nothing less. Bruno raised a cicala to his nose and sniffed. It smelled of ozone, seaweed, saltwater, and that indefinable reek of ocean coldness that flavors all the freshest seafood. He nodded. It was perfect.

These associations—Cavafy, my mother polishing the silver, a missionary aunt who fled the familiar turf of Tennessee for the otherness of Korea (presumably with the intent of teaching them something, hopefully with the result of being taught), my Mamaw’s fragrant old bureau with its smell of wax and polish—all of them would be brought to bear upon my painting of peppermints, but none of them would be visible; there’s no reason the viewer would know any of this. I could render only what can be seen—color and form, though the painter’s splendid artifice reveals to us texture, too, and rich associations of scent and flavor, all arriving through the gates of the eyes. And yet there is something more here, and that something is what nags at me to write this book, what tugs at my sleeve and my sleep. Why, if all that is personal has fallen away, should these pictures matter so? Why should they be alight with a feeling of intimacy? Interiority makes itself visible. In my imaginary still life, the “context and commentary” of my experience would be gone, but something would remain, something distilled and vibrant in the quality of attention itself. Is that what soul or spirit is, then, the outward-flying attention, the gaze that binds us to the world? Coorte’s asparagus, his gooseberries and shells, distill this quality down to its quietest, most startling essence: the eye suffuses what it sees with I. Not “I” in the sense of my story, the particulars of my life, the way my father tended his old asparagus beds each spring, the way my beloved loved the forms and colors of shells. But “I” as the quickest, subtlest thing we are: a moment of attention, an intimate engagement. Is that the lesson, then, that ultimately I becomes an eye? What is left of Adriaen Coorte but this? Isn’t that enough? […] That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of the sayable, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

Love, you are the dark cut into memory. Small, distant, as the sparrow’s eye.

We made love like oysters, and then we ate oysters. Then we made love like two people sitting on opposite ends of the sofa. Ah, but that’s life, no?

Then we sat in silence for a while, smoking cigarettes, surrounded by oyster shells, and finishing the wine. I was all at once very tired. I looked out into the narrow street, this strange, crooked corner where we sat, which was brazen now with the sunlight and heavy with people - people out will never understand. I ate abruptly, intolerably, with the longing to go home' not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill' but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood' to those things, those places, those people which I will always helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wonderer, and adventurer, rocking through the world, rocking thorough the world, anchored. I looked at Giovanni's face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that. While what was happening to me was not so strange as in all have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief.

Lavender in the hut, fertility beads under the mattress, a dreamcatcher by the plunge pool, oyster appetizers every afternoon, and a Michael Bolton love mix.

At the embassy for supper - quail in broth and oysters - Lady Browne remembered my father, whom she'd met at Queen Elizabeth's court. Yet one name only was on the tongue of Sir Richard: William Cavendish, newly made marquess. This gentleman, he reported between oysters, had recently fled to Hamburg after losing badly with a regiment raised near York. A master horseman and fencer, and one of the richest men in England, he wrote plays - oyster - collected viols - oyster - "his particular love in music" - and was by all accounts - oyster - affable and quick.

February 5: Marilyn is photographed in a two-shot with Carson McCullers, kissing her at McCullers’s home in Nyack, New York, and later with McCullers and Isak Dinesen, with the threesome seated and looking over a manuscript in Dinesen’s hands. In another shot, Miller is at the table with Marilyn and McCullers. He toasts Dinesen. They dine on oysters, white grapes, champagne, and a soufflé. Marilyn attends a screening of Some Like It Hot at Loews on Lexington Avenue in New York. The capacity audience laughs with approval. Arthur Miller loves the picture, but Marilyn is upset because she looks like a “fat pig.” She is photographed in the audience putting her hands to her face.

Mr. Harris had three boxes of Melba toast, a can of smoked oysters, a wheel of Gouda cheese, two bunches of grapes, a package of smoked salmon, a can of sardines, a bottle of sparkling grape juice and a can of cocktail weenies in his pants. I simply ask you to please use common sense. Thank you.

That evening he put me up at the Glasshouse Mountains Motel, a few miles from the zoo. Steve was very chivalrous. I met his parents and had dinner with the whole family. I also got my first taste of Australian humor. That night at dinner, I poured myself what I thought was a nice glass of juice. The entire Irwin family sat quiet and straight-faced. As I took a big swig, it nearly choked me. That’s when I learned about cordial, which is supposed to be mixed with water. I had poured it full strength. We all had a good laugh. The next night Steve and I went to dinner in Caloundra, a nearby town. He took me to a resort that featured an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner--seafood banquet, my favorite. I loaded my plate high with prawns, crab, oysters, and everything I loved. I didn’t know it then, but Steve was a bit worried that I was going to eat more than he did. At one point a little piece of crab flicked onto the crook of my arm. I deftly reached down with my tongue and managed to grab it off my elbow and eat it. Suddenly I felt self-conscious. Steve was staring at me. He looked at me with such love in his eyes, and I thought, He’s going to say something wonderful. Steve leaned forward and said affectionately, “ Gosh, you aren’t ladylike at all.” I burst out laughing. Apparently I’d done the right thing. I reflected back on my dad’s advice: No matter what, always be yourself. And it sure had worked. As we left the restaurant, Steve said, “You know, I smell ducks.” We walked outside, and sure enough, there was a flock of beautiful ducks bobbing around on a pond. “Steve, you are the most amazing bushman I’ve ever met,” I said. Of course, the resort and the pond had been there for years, and Steve had known about the ducks for just as long. “I smell ducks” was a Crocodile Dundee trick that had nevertheless worked its magic on this naïve American girl. And then, suddenly, the weekend was over. Steve drove me back down to Brisbane. I had the biggest ache in my heart. I had fallen hard. As we said good-bye, he put his arms around me for the first time, and I felt all his strength and warmth in that embrace. But it was over. I was going back to my side of the world. I had no idea if I would ever see Steve Irwin again.

The next night Steve and I went to dinner in Caloundra, a nearby town. He took me to a resort that featured an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner--seafood banquet, my favorite. I loaded my plate high with prawns, crab, oysters, and everything I loved. I didn’t know it then, but Steve was a bit worried that I was going to eat more than he did. At one point a little piece of crab flicked onto the crook of my arm. I deftly reached down with my tongue and managed to grab it off my elbow and eat it. Suddenly I felt self-conscious. Steve was staring at me. He looked at me with such love in his eyes, and I thought, He’s going to say something wonderful. Steve leaned forward and said affectionately, “ Gosh, you aren’t ladylike at all.” I burst out laughing. Apparently I’d done the right thing. I reflected back on my dad’s advice: No matter what, always be yourself. And it sure had worked.

Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin's conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portugese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

We celebrated her freedom on Tuesday night with a visit to Opart Thai House, where I introduced her to the magic of brilliantly prepared Thai dishes for the first time. She really loved the appetizers, especially the Tiger Cry, a marinated grilled beef with a spicy dipping sauce, as well as the chicken and eggplant in oyster sauce, and pad kra praow, a ground-pork dish with basil and peppers, which felt almost familiar to her- it has a background that tastes a bit like crumbled Italian fennel sausage. She liked the pad Thai, which she thought her youngest would really enjoy, and was sure that Gio would at least get into the various satays and embrace the broccoli and beef.

We'll start with oysters on the half shell and homemade salt-and-pepper potato chips, just to whet the appetites. Then a wedge salad with homemade ranch dressing and crumbled peppered bacon. For the main course, a slow-roasted prime rib, twice-baked potatoes, creamed spinach, tomato pudding baked into tomato halves, and fresh popovers instead of bread. For dessert, the world's most perfect chocolate cream pie. Marcy and I went on a Sunday boondoggle to Milwaukee last year and had lunch at this terrific gastropub called Palomino, and while the whole meal was spectacular, notably the fried chicken, the chocolate cream pie was life changing for us both. Marcy used her pastry-chef wiles to get the recipe, and we both love any excuse to make it. It's serious comfort food, and I can't think of a better way to ring in the New Year.

The fish vendor had delivered a sea of heavenly delights. Les gambas, large shrimp, were the size of my hand. Once cooked, they'd be lovely and pink. The oysters were enormous and beautiful, the briny scent conjuring up the sea. I couldn't remember the last time I'd swum in open water. Six years ago on a Sunday trip to the Hamptons with Eric? Oh God, I didn't want to think about him. Besides the work of shucking more than three hundred of them, oysters were easy. They'd be served raw with a mignonette sauce and lemons, along with crayfish, crab, and shrimp, accompanied by a saffron-infused aioli dipping sauce. I lifted the top of another crate, and fifty or so lobsters with spiny backs greeted me- beautiful and big, and the top portion freckled by the sea. I loved working with lobster, the way their color changed from mottled brown and orange to a fiery red when cooked. I'd use the tails for le plat principal, flambéed in cognac and simmered in a spicy tomato- my version of my grandmother's recipe for langouste à la armoricaine. The garnish? A sprig of fresh rosemary. The other crates were filled with lovely mussels, scallops, whelks, and smoked salmon filets, along with another surprise- escargots. Save for the snails, this meal would be a true seafood extravaganza.

The best recipe for true love is plenty of time spent in close proximity; plus a little jeopardy to face together.’ ‘Proximity and Jeopardy.’ Joe laughed. ‘That’s the Trevarrick secret, is it?’ ‘And a generous helping of time. The jeopardy is optional, but it makes for a better story. It’s like the grain of sand in the oyster that creates the pearl.

never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity; I had no way of honoring, of giving small voice to the praise of such natural innocence, such generous simplicity. Now I know that a part of me would like to have traveled the world as he traveled it, a jester of burning faith, a fool and a forest prince brimming with the love of God. I would like to have walked his southern world, thanking God for oysters and porpoises, praising God for birdsong and sheet lightning, and seeing God reflected in pools of creekwater and the eyes of stray cats. I would like to have talked to yard dogs and tanagers as if they were my friends and fellow travelers along the sun-tortured highways, intoxicated with a love of God, swollen with charity like a rainbow, in the thoughtless mingling of its hues, connecting two distant fields in its glorious arc.

Every month she opened the alleys for a fete. Beer and beef, oysters, pints of ice cream, brandy, a cake riddled with cherries, pies of all sorts (pork, treacle, kidney), more beer. Each fete lasted the entire day, was serially every kind of gathering: in the morning, a party for children, then a ladies' lunch, then a tea, cocktails, then (as the day began to unravel) a light supper, a frolic, a soiree, a carousal, a blowout, a dance, and as people began to drink themselves sober, a conversation, an optimistic repentance, a vow for greatness, love.

We also ate well in the kitchen, and I found that I had inherited my father's palate and appreciation of good food. Our cuisine at home always been rather basic, even in the days when we had a cook, and I became fascinated with the process of creating such wonderful flavors. "Show me how you made that parsley sauce, those meringues, that oyster stew," I'd say to Mrs Robbins, the cook. And if she had a minute to spare, she would show me. After a while, seeing my willingness as well as my obvious aptitude for cooking, she suggested to Mrs Tilley that her old legs were not up to standing for hours any more and that she needed an assistant cook. And she requested me. Mrs Tilley agreed, but only if she didn't have to pay me more money and I should still be available to do my party piece whenever she entertained. And so I went to work in the kitchen. Mrs Robbins found me a willing pupil. After lugging coal scuttles up all those stairs, it felt like heaven to be standing at a table preparing food. We had a scullery maid who did all the most menial of jobs, like chopping the onions and peeling the potatoes, but I had to do the most basic of tasks- mashing the potatoes with lots of butter and cream until there wasn't a single lump, basting the roast so that the fat was evenly crisp. I didn't mind. I loved being amongst the rich aromas. I loved the look of a well-baked pie. The satisfaction when Mrs Robbins nodded with approval at something I had prepared. And of course I loved the taste of what I had created. Now when I went home to Daddy and Louisa, I could say, "I roasted that pheasant. I made that apple tart." And it gave me a great rush of satisfaction to say the words. "You've a good feel of it, I'll say that for you," Mrs Robbins told me, and after a while she even sought my opinion. "Does this casserole need a touch more salt, do you think? Or maybe some thyme?" The part I loved the best was the baking. She showed me how to make pastry, meringues that were light as air, all sorts of delicate biscuits and rich cakes.

Taking Mayur to the market is a little bit like taking a foot fetishist shoe shopping. He gets this look in his eyes, and he likes to pet the vegetables. I had discovered a new market, open Wednesdays and Saturdays, just on the other side of the boulevard de Belleville. This one was more expensive than my regular market- there were smaller producers, more wicker baskets and baby zucchini. Like most American foodies when they come to France, Mayur was in ecstasy over the variety of mushrooms, the comparatively low cost of oysters, foie gras, and, of course, champagne. I thought he was going to cheer when he saw the scallops. "They sell them live," he said, loading us up with three kilos. They offered to shell them for us. "Non, non," he insisted with a defiant wave. "We'll do it ourselves.

Dickens’s American Notes was regarded as an insult by most Americans in part because he chose to examine and criticize at length slavery, the prison system, and even an asylum for the mentally ill, which he, not always a reliable reporter, identified as being “on Long Island, or Rhode Island: I forget which.” He said that American men spit and that they pirated books, both of which were true. He thought the press was abominable and the prairie not as good as Salisbury Plain and also lacking a Stonehenge. But the ill-feelings of Americans may also in part stem from what the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, in probably the best of the nineteenth-century European books on America, Democracy in America, identified as an American trait: an unyielding resentment of any criticism from abroad. American Notes, in fact, has many favorable things to say about New York. For that matter Fanny Trollope loved New York, was one of the first to declare it the leading American city, and found it pleasantly different from the rest of America: New York, indeed, appeared to us, even when we saw it by a soberer light, a lovely and a noble city. To us who had been so long traveling through half-cleared forests, and sojourning among an “I’m-as-good-as-you” population, it seemed, perhaps, more beautiful, more splendid, and more refined than it might have done, had we arrived there directly from London; but making every allowance for this, I must still declare that I think New York one of the finest cities I ever saw, and as much superior to every other in the Union, (Philadelphia not excepted,) as London to Liverpool, or Paris to Rouen.

{2} Neither did I but vacant seasons spend In this my scribble; nor did I intend But to divert myself in doing this From worser thoughts which make me do amiss. Thus, I set pen to paper with delight, And quickly had my thoughts in black and white. For, having now my method by the end, Still as I pulled, it came; and so I penned It down: until it came at last to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see. Well, when I had thus put mine ends together, I shewed them others, that I might see whether They would condemn them, or them justify: And some said, Let them live; some, Let them die; Some said, JOHN, print it; others said, Not so; Some said, It might do good; others said, No. Now was I in a strait, and did not see Which was the best thing to be done by me: At last I thought, Since you are thus divided, I print it will, and so the case decided. {3} For, thought I, some, I see, would have it done, Though others in that channel do not run: To prove, then, who advised for the best, Thus I thought fit to put it to the test. I further thought, if now I did deny Those that would have it, thus to gratify. I did not know but hinder them I might Of that which would to them be great delight. For those which were not for its coming forth, I said to them, Offend you I am loth, Yet, since your brethren pleased with it be, Forbear to judge till you do further see. If that thou wilt not read, let it alone; Some love the meat, some love to pick the bone. Yea, that I might them better palliate, I did too with them thus expostulate:-- {4} May I not write in such a style as this? In such a method, too, and yet not miss My end--thy good? Why may it not be done? Dark clouds bring waters, when the bright bring none. Yea, dark or bright, if they their silver drops Cause to descend, the earth, by yielding crops, Gives praise to both, and carpeth not at either, But treasures up the fruit they yield together; Yea, so commixes both, that in her fruit None can distinguish this from that: they suit Her well when hungry; but, if she be full, She spews out both, and makes their blessings null. You see the ways the fisherman doth take To catch the fish; what engines doth he make? Behold how he engageth all his wits; Also his snares, lines, angles, hooks, and nets; Yet fish there be, that neither hook, nor line, Nor snare, nor net, nor engine can make thine: They must be groped for, and be tickled too, Or they will not be catch'd, whate'er you do. How does the fowler seek to catch his game By divers means! all which one cannot name: His guns, his nets, his lime-twigs, light, and bell: He creeps, he goes, he stands; yea, who can tell Of all his postures? Yet there's none of these Will make him master of what fowls he please. Yea, he must pipe and whistle to catch this, Yet, if he does so, that bird he will miss. If that a pearl may in a toad's head dwell, And may be found too in an oyster-shell; If things that promise nothing do contain What better is than gold; who will disdain, That have an inkling of it, there to look, That they may find it? Now, my little book, (Though void of all these paintings that may make It with this or the other man to take) Is not without those things that do excel What do in brave but empty notions dwell.

Know thy self, and the world will be thy oyster!

I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature's greatest gifts. By the age of ten I had learned to break down a full lobster with my bare hands and a nutcracker. I devoured steak tartare, pâtés, sardines, snails baked in butter and smothered with roasted garlic. I tried raw sea cucumber, abalone, and oysters on the half shell. At night my mother would roast dried cuttlefish on a camp stove in the garage and serve it with a bowl of peanuts and a sauce of red pepper paste mixed with Japanese mayonnaise. My father would tear it into strips and we'd eat it watching television together until our jaws were sore, and I'd wash it all down with small sips from one of my mother's Coronas. Neither one of my parents graduated from college. I was not raised in a household with many books or records. I was not exposed to fine art at a young age or taken to any museums or plays at established cultural institutions. My parents wouldn't have known the names of authors I should read or foreign directors I should watch. I was not given an old edition of Catcher in the Rye as a preteen, copies of Rolling Stones records on vinyl, or any kind of instructional material from the past that might help give me a leg up to cultural maturity. But my parents were worldly in their own ways. They had seen much of the world and had tasted what it had to offer. What they lacked in high culture, they made up for by spending their hard-earned money on the finest of delicacies. My childhood was rich with flavor---blood sausage, fish intestines, caviar. They loved good food, to make it, to seek it, to share it, and I was an honorary guest at their table.

Oyster (2019)   Polari was a secret language used by gay men and queer people in Britain before the 1960s to avoid persecution. And I shut my sheesh screech.
He said cut that cackle fag.
My tongue was deaners    he did a nob. With her moey sewn closed
I brought him a hungry chavvy.
He said show me how loving me reefs. He said order and I ordered.
He said vagary and I vagaried.
Charpering to be needed I dhobied in ice for weeks
buvare. When it breaks
his fever met with my cody. It’s ben
To say it’s bona. In your lettie
the omee   at the same time wants to tip your brandy and battyfang you.
I savvy how it goes when an omee
with vera after every lamor dhobies out his moey.
I’d vada   him   to the sink after
straight tight oyster who charpered to not palaver me.
Been palavaed by flatties.
I’ve been an omee’s screech’s secret too. • I too have been the secret on a man’s lips.
Spoken by someone who wished
they didn’t need to speak me. Clenched jaw. Straight
to the sink after. I’d watch him
wash his mouth out with gin after each kiss.
I know how it is to feel desired
and despised at the same time by the same person   in the same bed
to tell yourself this is normal
this is fine to answer his fever with your body
something drinkable when it breaks.
I have bathed in ice for weeks waiting to be necessary.
He said go and I went.
He said come and I came. He said show me how it feels to love me.
I brought him a hungry child
who’d sewn her own mouth shut. He rattled his tin   my tongue became coins.
He said shut your mouth faggot
and I shut my faggot mouth.