At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

verdant pasture but parched and cracked with tiny fissures running up and down and into each other; and, seen from high above, the fissures presented beauty: not a pleasure to the eye but beauty all the same; still, dead, dead it was. Dead lay everything that had lived and dead also lay everything that would live. All had had or would have its season. And what should it matter that its season lasted five billion years or five minutes? There it is now, dead, vanished into darkness, banished from life. First living briefly, then dead in eternity. How vainly I struggle against this. Toil, toil, night and day. Here a house is built. Here a monument is erected to commemorate something called a good deed, or even in remembrance of a woman with exceptional qualities, and all that she loved and all that she did. Here are some children, and immeasurable is the love and special attention lavished on them. Vanished now is the house. Vanished now is the monument. Silent now are the children. I recall the house, I recall the monument, I summon up the children from the eternity of darkness, and sometimes, briefly, they appear, though always slightly shrouded, always as if they had emerged from mounds of ashes, chipped, tarnished, in fragments, or large parts missing: the ribbons, for instance, gone from the children’s hair. These children whom I loved best—better than the monument, better than the house—once were so beautiful that they were thought unearthly. Dead is the past. Dead shall the future be. And what stands before my eyes, as soon as I turn my back, dead is that, too. Shall I shed tears? Sorrow is bound to death. Grief is bound to death. Each moment is not as fragile and fleeting as I once thought. Each moment is hard and lasting and so holds much that I must mourn for. And so what a bitter thing to say to me: that life is the intrusion, that to embrace a thing as beauty is the intrusion, that to believe a thing true and therefore undeniable, that is the intrusion; and, yes, false are all appearances. What a bitter thing to say to me, I who for time uncountable have always seen myself as newly born, filled with a truth and a beauty that could not be denied, living in a world of light that I called eternal, a world that can know no end. I now know regret. And that, too, is bound to death. And what do I regret? Surely not that I stand in the knowledge of the presence of death. For knowledge is a good thing; you have said that. What I regret is that in the face of death and all that it is and all that it shall be I stand powerless, that in the face of death my will, to which everything I have ever known bends, stands as if it were nothing more than a string caught in the early-morning wind.
    Now! There lived a small creature, and it lived as both male and female inside a mound that it made on the ground, its body wholly covered with short fur, broadly striped, in the colors field-yellow and field-blue. It hunted a honeybee once, and when the bee, in bee anger and fright, stung the creature on the corner of the mouth, the pain was so unbearably delicious that never did this creature hunt a honeybee again. It walked over and over the wide space that surrounded the mound in which it lived. As it walked over and over the wide ground that surrounded the mound in which it lived, it watched its own feet sink into the grass and heard the ever so slight sound the grass made as it gave way to the pressure, and as it saw and heard, it felt a pleasure unbearably delicious, and, each time, the pleasure unbearably delicious was new to this creature. It lived so, banking up each unbearably delicious pleasure in deep, dark memory unspeakable, hoping to perhaps one day throw the memories into a dungeon, or burn them on an ancient pyre, or banish them to land barren, but now it kept them in this way. Then all its unbearably delicious pleasure it kept free, each thing taken, time in, time out, as if it were new, just born. It lived so