16. WRITTEN ON THE BODY

Jeanette Winterson 1992

This is an extraordinary love story, well written in stunning and mesmerizing language. It is passionate but never explicit. It is also the first time I have read a main character, the narrator, who is gender unspecified. And strip of the cliches, all you have left is an all-consuming love between two people.

"Why is the measure of love loss?"

"You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know that? My experience has been that time always ends."

"Is it odd to say that your lover reminds you of a tree? Well she does, its the way her hair fills with wind and sweeps out around the head. Very often I expect her to rustle. She doesn't rustle but her flesh has the moonlit shade of silver birch. Would I had a hedge of such saplings naked and unadorned."

"I went to look at my sunflowers, growing steadily, sure that the sun would be there for them, fulfilling themselves in the proper way at the proper time. Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom."

"In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with the future in its palm."

"Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it's not an absence of feeling?...Contentment is the positive side of resignation."

"When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not someting you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation."

"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille."

"I cannot think of the double curve lithe and flowing with movement as a bony ridge, I think of it as the musical instrument that bears the same root. Clavis. Key. Clavichord. The first stringed instrument with a keyboard. Your clavicle is both the keyboard and the key."

"What then kills love? Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought."