Passage from The Favourite Game — Leonard Cohen

Whenever they could they played their great game, the Soldier and the Whore. They played it in whatever room they could. He was on leave from the front and she was a whore of DeBullion Street.

Knock, knock, the door opened slowly.

They shook hands and he tickled her palm with his forefinger.

Thus they participated in that mysterious activity the accuracies of which the adults keep so coyly hidden with French words, with Yiddish words, with spelled-out words; that veiled ritual about which night-club comedians construct their humour; that unapproachable knowledge which grownups guard to guarantee their authority.

Their game forbade talking dirty or roughhouse. They had no knowledge of the sordid aspect of brothels, and who knows if there is one? They thought of them as some sort of pleasure palace, places denied them as arbitrarily as Montreal movie theatres.

Whores were ideal women just as soldiers were ideal men.

“Pay me now?”

“Here’s all my money, beautiful baby.”

Lightly

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.
— Aldous Huxley, Island

Journal entry

 

I had you

 

As long as there is love, there will be grief

The grief of time passing, of life moving on half-finished, of empty spaces that were once bursting with the laughter and energy of people we loved.
As long as there is love there will be grief because grief is love's natural continuation.
It shows up in the aisles of stores we once frequented, in the whiff of cologne we get two years after they've been gone.

Grief is a giant neon sign, protruding through everything, pointing everywhere, broadcasting loudly, "LOVE WAS HERE". In the finer print, quietly, "LOVE STILL IS"

— Heidi Priebe