The Two Kinds of Decay (15 page)

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Authors: Sarah Manguso

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The End

There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else's.

This is the usual sort of book about illness. Someone gets sick, someone gets well.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of a self.

Most people consider their own suffering a widely applicable model, and I am no exception.

This is suffering's lesson:
pay attention.
The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

You might not know to love it.

But to pay attention is to love everything.

To see the future as
brightness.

Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see things only as their own fatal brightness, and there is nothing after that brightness.

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing.

You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness, into brightness.

ALSO BY SARAH MANGUSO

The Captain Lands in Paradise
Siste Viator
Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape

Sarah Manguso is the author of two books of poetry,
Siste Viator
and
The Captain Lands in Paradise,
and the short story collection
Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape
. In 2007 she was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

eISBN 9781429940986

First eBook Edition : April 2011

First Picador Edition: June 2009