Reading Notes: The Emperor of Gladness

Ocean Vuong

"The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it's beautiful here, even the ghosts agree. Mornings, when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, they rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing's mouth."

"How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a light bulb, reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody's son."

"... to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself."

"No matter how many years the body wrecks itself on the shore of living, the mouth stays mostly the same, faithful through its empty, eternal void. Some call this hunger. Others call it loss. He knows it only as the law. Whole nations have burned from this little oval ringed with teeth."

"Neither of them spoke for a long time during the ride back. It was that vast emptiness one feels after any gathering, where the muscles still throbbed with people's voices, energies both expelled and unspent, and the cab became a kind of cradle, lulling them to stillness"

"Only in springtime, it seemed, does gravity work backward here. The dandelion pollen rising in great squalls, the flower buds shooting up, further from the ground, as if pulled by the sky's sudden need for them, all of it under the crisp brilliance of April sunlight."