there's some spoilers here
NOBODY WRITES LIKE TONI MORRISON! The scene of Sula and Nel playing in the grass as girls, the scene where Sula is fucking Ajax, the last Suicide Day of the novel, every time she wrote about Bottom – how can I hold onto these moments for forever? I wanna talk about it, in circles and circles.
She writes about a world where everything is yawning – the dress shoes, the kilns, the gaping mouth of the tunnel that held years of leaf-dead promises, Eva in her final mortal form.
Each time, the yawn opens up a little portal, a little void, where loneliness and love sneak in. A loneliness born out of people constantly leaving (where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed?). A loneliness that begets possession (all the married couples in the story). A love that demands nothing of one another, a love that wholly accepts one another (Sula and Nel, kinda).
What did Sula feel when she watched Hannah burn, what did Eva feel when she burned Plum to death, what did Nel feel at the site of Chicken Little’s death, what did the girls feel when Sula cut her finger in front of those boys? How did any of the mothers in this story feel about their kids? More than a yawning world, Morrison defers to the kind of world where no one really knows… anything… no one knows about our bones, or the cluster of steel shavings spinning out at our core, or that soft ball of fur… all the things we can’t see lurking beneath our skin. Everyone tries to explain it all away, with spite, or contempt, or an ever-evolving lore. But we are repeatedly left with nothing but hurricanes, where there’s no bottom and there’s no top, just circles and circles.
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