I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.
Interpretation
Traveling light symbolizes freedom and the desire to avoid being burdened by material possessions.
In this quote, Nicole Krauss expresses a deep philosophical yearning for freedom from the constraints of material possessions and domestic life. By likening these possessions to weights that could break the ice beneath her, she emphasizes the unease that comes with feeling trapped or burdened by the trappings of everyday life. It reflects a desire for simplicity and the ability to move through life with ease and spontaneity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about minimalism.
To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.
For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love.
Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn't an ache but something different.
Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him.
Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across the field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark they parted with leaves in their hair.
One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.
The drying up a single tear has more, of honest fame, than shedding seas of gore.
One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.
I think part of picking where you live in New York is accepting who you are. Really looking at yourself and going, 'Yeah, I'm not cool enough for the West Village.'
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