from Don't Let Me Be Lonely

by Claudia Rankine

Or I remember that the last two sentences I read in Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee before falling asleep the previous night were: "I learned to renounce a sense of independence by degrees and finally felt defeated by the times I lived in. Obedient to them."

Or, well, I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist. The world, like a giant liver, receives everyone and everything, including these words: Is he dead? Is she dead? The words remain an inscription on the surface of my loneliness. This loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness. The Coetzee's Costello says in her fictional lecture, "for instants at a time I know what it is like to be a corpse."