Elegy

"Because our conversations were few (he phoned me maybe 5 times in 22 years) I study his sentences the ones I remember as if I'd been asked to translate them."

--Anne Carson, Nox

Anne Carson's Nox -- an elegy and memorial for her brother, who passed away recently -- is a hybrid between a scrapbook and a translation, an elegantly folded exploration of how grief works its way through a psyche for which syntax is soulcraft. I don't want to write a full review of it here, especially after others have already done such a nice job: here and here.

But I can't not say something about the line quoted above because it is such a poignant way of describing both the need to savor the linguistic remains of someone with whom you can no longer speak and the need to comb fine the surface of a conversation, a phrase, a word, to scrape free any last residue of the mind that bore it.

A reminder that sometimes language is not the only impediment to understanding.