Hamnet
When Eliza hears these claims, made in her presence by people in the street, by neighbours, by those to whom she sells gloves, she doesn’t pretend not to have heard. She stops in her tracks. She holds the eye of the gossip in question (she has an unnerving stare: this she knows – her brother has told her often enough; it is, he says, something to do with the purity of her eye-colour, the way she can open her eyes wide enough for the whole iris to be seen). She is only thirteen but she is tall for her age. She holds their gaze long enough for them to drop their stare, for them to shuffle off, chastised by her boldness, her silent severity. There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.
From the archives
·
1985
Galapagos
Mary Hepburn and the Captain had good teeth when they arrived on Santa Rosalia, although they were both well over thirty, thanks to regular visits to dentists, who drilled out rot and drained abscesses and so on. But they were toothless when they died. Selena MacIntosh was so young when she died in a suicide pact with Hisako Hiroguchi that she still had a lot of her teeth, but by no means all of them. Hisako was completely toothless then.
And if I were criticizing human bodies as they were a million years ago, the kind of body I had, as though they were machines somebody intended to put on the market, I would have two main points to make — one of which I have surely made by now in my story: “The brain is much too big to be practical.” The other would be: “Something is always going wrong with our teeth. They don’t last anything like a lifetime, usually. What chain of events in evolution should we thank for our mouthfuls of rotting crockery?”
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Galapagos
Mary Hepburn and the Captain had good teeth when they arrived on Santa Rosalia, although they were both well over thirty, thanks to regular visits to dentists, who drilled out rot and drained abscesses and so on. But they were toothless when they died. Selena MacIntosh was so young when she died in a suicide pact with Hisako Hiroguchi that she still had a lot of her teeth, but by no means all of them. Hisako was completely toothless then.
And if I were criticizing human bodies as they were a million years ago, the kind of body I had, as though they were machines somebody intended to put on the market, I would have two main points to make — one of which I have surely made by now in my story: “The brain is much too big to be practical.” The other would be: “Something is always going wrong with our teeth. They don’t last anything like a lifetime, usually. What chain of events in evolution should we thank for our mouthfuls of rotting crockery?”
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WORDS TO LIVE BY
1986 ·
NON-FICTION
NEW MUSIC