Back and forth she went each morning by the river, spring arriving once again; foolish, foolish spring, breaking open its tiny buds, and what she couldn’t stand was how—for many years, really—she had been made happy by such a thing. She had not thought she would ever become immune to the beauty of the physical world, but there you were. The river sparkled with the sun that rose, enough that she needed her sunglasses.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the bittersweet relationship with nature's beauty and its ability to bring happiness.
In this quote, Elizabeth Strout captures the essence of nature's cyclical beauty, particularly the arrival of spring. The narrator is conflicted, feeling both joy and a sense of weariness from having been consistently uplifted by nature's splendor over the years. This highlights the human experience of becoming desensitized to the beauty that once brought immense joy, contrasting the transient nature of happiness and the familiar, yet sometimes overlooked, magic of the physical world.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of environmental conservation, one might quote this to highlight the emotional connection we have with nature.
He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing though each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.
Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.
Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.
And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.
I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.
You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.
What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.
How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? ... The end of living and the beginning of survival.
From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow.
I have tried to keep my eco-anxiety at bay, to box it into my working life. But every month this becomes more difficult. The rising sense of panic I feel is entirely rational; we should all be feeling it. But we can't live with it through every hour of every day.
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