Memoir and Myth
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A crash implied violence, panic, an ending. This was an arrival, an unscheduled landing, an argument with physics that had concluded in a draw. The aircraft had stopped in a field with its dignity compromised, yes, but the pilot had walked away with his. He could live with that. From the outside, it looked worse.
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The true double bind is not merely a clash of obligations. It is a collision between incompatible moral worlds, each claiming total legitimacy. What makes it intolerable is not that you cannot satisfy all parties, but that whichever path you take will retroactively redefine you as immoral in someone else’s story. You are not allowed
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There is a particular species of man one encounters in failing organisations. Not the usurper. Not the saboteur. Not the visionary who sees flames as an opportunity for rebirth. No. This man is humbler, softer, and altogether more revealing. He is the one found in doorways. Neither fully in the room nor fully out of
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I remember the birth because it was winter. I remember the smell of disinfectant, and Peter’s hands, warm and steady, holding mine. I remember feeling nothing and thinking that must be what peace was. They said she was small, fragile. He called her perfect. I told myself I’d given him a gift. I said it
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The story written is not the only story that could be told. The same circumstances – the same childhood, the same betrayal, the same courtroom silence – can be narrated as the making of a monster or the tempering of a saint. Events are fixed; meaning is not. This is what Jung understood when he
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There was a time when the phrase “a good man” carried moral weight. It did not mean a harmless man, nor a man subdued by guilt or fashion, but a man who had learned to master his own capacity for destruction. A good man was dangerous, disciplined, and devoted. He could protect without posturing, and
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She was born beneath a silence, her first breath woven through with forgetting. They pressed a story into her skin, but the ink dissolved before it dried. She drank Lethe in her mother’s arms, unwitting, unknowing, learning the taste of absence as nourishment. Her lullabies were pauses, her cradle padded with omissions. Two fathers circled
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I call them the good years. I have always called them that. Beaming as though your brightness were my achievement. Perhaps it was. I left too many silences in my wake, so you filled them with pride on my behalf. It was easier that way. D had remarried. She hated me, her eyes narrowed whenever
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There are wounds that excuse folly. There are losses that explain frailty. But there are no wounds, no losses, no fractures that excuse betrayal disguised as virtue. The matriarch who has lived long enough to know suffering has no right to perpetuate it. She who has tasted abandonment, who has seen the chaos of divided
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I told myself I was trying. That was the word I clung to – trying. A good house, a lovely baby, and a man who worked because he loved us. But each evening I felt the walls move closer, until I was phoning the police because the dark was unbearable. Hospitals too. I wanted someone
Reade Saunders 