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Darling, You Asked Me To Write You A Letter, So I Am Writing You A Letter. I Do Not Know Why I Am Writing You This Letter, Or What This Letter Is Supposed To Be About, But I Am Writing It Nonetheless, Because I Love You Very Much And Trust That You Have Some Good Purpose For Having Me Write This Letter. I Hope That One Day You Will Have The Experience Of Doing Something You Do Not Understand For Someone You Love. Your Father

-Jonathan Safran Foer

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Darling, You Asked Me

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Darling, You Asked Me To Write You A Letter, So I Am Writing You A Letter. I Do Not Know Why I Am Writing You This Letter, Or What This Letter Is Supposed To Be About, But I Am Writing It Nonetheless, Because I Love You Very Much And Trust That You Have Some Good Purpose For Having Me Write This Letter. I Hope That One Day You Will Have The Experience Of Doing Something You Do Not Understand For Someone You Love. Your Father

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[grandfather] Would Manufacture Funnies With Grandmother Before She Died About How He Was In Love With Other Women Who Were Not Her. She Knew It Was Only Funnies Because She Would Laugh In Volumes. 'anna,' He Would Say, 'i Am Going To Marry That One With The Pink Hat.' And She Would Say, 'to Whom Are You Going To Marry Her?' And He Would Say, 'to Me.' I Would Laugh Very Much In The Back Seat, And She Would Say To Him, 'but You Are No Priest.' And He Would Say, 'i Am Today.' And She Would Say, 'today You Believe In God?' And He Would Say, 'today I Believe In Love.

There Are Still Many Different Ways To Get Stuck, Existentially Stuck. Feeling Like, "this Is Worthless. I'm Wasting My Time, And I Would Be Wasting The Time Of Someone Who Tried To Read This." It Happens All The Time.

It Was The First Time I Had Ever Made Love. I Wondered If He Knew That. It Felt Like Crying. I Wondered, Why Does Anyone Ever Make Love?

If Nothing Matters, There's Nothing To Save.

Nothing Matters

He Was Someone Whom Everyone Admired And Liked But Whom Nobody Knew. He Was Like A Book That You Could Feel Good Holding, That You Could Talk About Without Ever Having Read, That You Could Recommend.

I Spent My Life Learning To Feel Less. Every Day I Felt Less. Is That Growing Old? Or Is It Something Worse? You Cannot Protect Yourself From Sadness Without Protecting Yourself From Happiness.

I Looked At Everyone And Wondered Where They Came From, And Who They Missed, And What They Were Sorry For.

...there Are Only Some Many Times You Can Utter "it Does Not Hurt" Before It Begins To Hurt Even More Than The Hurt.

We Need Enormous Pockets, Pockets Big Enough For Our Families And Our Friends, And Even The People Who Aren't On Our Lists, People We've Never Met But Still Want To Protect. We Need Pockets For Boroughs And For Cities, A Pocket That Could Hold The Universe.

In Truth I Was Manufacturing A Brick Wall Of Shits.

Cher Marcel, Allô. I Am Oskar's Mom. I Have Thought About It A Ton, And I Have Decided That It Isn't Obvious Why Oskar Should Go To French Lessons, So He Will No Longer Be Going To Go See You On Sundays Like He Used To. I Want To Thank You Very Much For Everything You Have Taught Oskar, Particularly The Conditional Tense, Which Is Weird. Obviously, There's No Need To Call Me When Oskar Doesn't Come To His Lessons, Because I Already Know, Because This Was My Decision. Also, I Will Keep Sending You Checks, Because You Are A Nice Guy. Votre Ami Dévouée, Mademoiselle Schell.

I Could Not Believe In A God That Would Challenge Faith Like This.

We Laughed And Laughed, Together And Separately, Out Loud And Silently, We Were Determined To Ignore Whatever Needed To Be Ignored, To Build A New World From Nothing If Nothing In Our World Could Be Salvaged, It Was One Of The Best Days Of My Life, A Day During Which I Lived My Life And Didn't Think About My Life At All.

I Could Tell That Mom Was Dreaming, But I Didn't Want To Know What She Was Dreaming About, Because I Had Enough Of My Own Nightmares, And If She Had Been Dreaming Something Happy, I Would Have Been Angry At Her For Dreaming Something Happy.

The Only Way To Overcome Sadness Is To Consume It.

I Think It's Very Pretty. Can It Be Pretty If No One Thinks It's Pretty? I Think It's Pretty. If You're The Only One? That's Pretty Pretty. And What About The Boys? Don't You Want Them To Think You're Pretty? I Wouldn't Want A Boy To Think I Was Pretty Unless He Was The Kind Of Boy Who Thought I Was Pretty.

Every Widow Wakes One Morning, Perhaps After Years Of Pure And Unwavering Grieving, To Realize She Slept A Good Night's Sleep, And Will Be Able To Eat Breakfast, And Doesn't Hear Her Husband's Ghost All The Time, But Only Some Of The Time. Her Grief Is Replaced With A Useful Sadness. Every Parent Who Loses A Child Finds A Way To Laugh Again. The Timbre Begins To Fade. The Edge Dulls. The Hurt Lessens. Every Love Is Carved From Loss. Mine Was. Yours Is. Your Great-great-great-grandchildren's Will Be. But We Learn To Live In That Love.

I Desperately Wish I Had My Tambourine With Me Now, Because Even After Everything I'm Still Wearing Heavy Boots, And Sometimes It Helps To Play A Good Beat

Perhaps In The Back Of Our Minds We Already Understand, Without All The Science I've Discussed, That Something Terribly Wrong Is Happening. Our Sustenance Now Comes From Misery. We Know That If Someone Offers To Show Us A Film On How Our Meat Is Produced, It Will Be A Horror Film. We Perhaps Know More Than We Care To Admit, Keeping It Down In The Dark Places Of Our Memory-- Disavowed. When We Eat Factory-farmed Meat We Live, Literally, On Tortured Flesh. Increasingly, That Tortured Flesh Is Becoming Our Own.

I Wanted To Tell Her Everything, Maybe If I'd Been Able To, We Could Have Lived Differently, Maybe I'd Be There With You Now Instead Of Here. Maybe... If I'd Said, 'i'm So Afraid Of Losing Something I Love That I Refuse To Love Anything,' Maybe That Would Have Made The Impossible Possible. Maybe, But I Couldn't Do It, I Had Buried Too Much Too Deeply Inside Me. And Here I Am, Instead Of There.

I Realized I Was On A Something Island. 'how Did I Get Here,' I Wondered, Surrounded By Nothing, "and How Can I Get Back?

There Are Only So Many Times That You Can Utter ‘it Does Not Hurt’ Before It Begins To Hurt Even More Than The Hurt. You Become Enlightened Of The Feeling Of Feeling Hurt, Which Is Worse, I Am Certain, Than The Existent Hurt.

I Dreamt Four Nights Ago Of Clock Hands Descending From The Universe Like Rain, Of The Moon As A Green Eye, Of Mirrors And Insects, Of A Love That Never Withdrew. It Was Not The Feeling Of Completeness That I So Needed, But The Feeling Of Not Being Empty.

The Way That I Feel About My Jewish Identity Has Been Really Radically Changed By Events In Life. Like, Becoming A Writer Is One. Having Children Is Another. And Getting Older And Watching, You Know, My Parents And Grandparents Get Older Has Been Another, The Seasons Of - Being Witness To The Seasons Of Life And Wanting To Have Some Kind Of Infrastructure To Deal With It, To Cope With Them. Ritual Has Become More Important To Me As I've Gotten Older. It's Not Always Religious Ritual, But It Often Borrows From Judaism.

I Felt, That Night, On That Stage, Under That Skull, Incredibly Close To Everything In The Universe, But Also Extremely Alone. I Wondered, For The First Time In My Life, If Life Was Worth All The Work It Took To Live. What Exactly Made It Worth It? What's So Horrible About Being Dead Forever, And Not Feeling Anything, And Not Even Dreaming? What's So Great About Feeling And Dreaming?

I Got Tired, I Told Him. Not Worn Out, But Worn Through. Like One Of Those Wives Who Wakes Up One Morning And Says I Can't Bake Any More Bread.

We've Made Science Experiments Of Ourselves And Our Children.

Every Factory-farmed Animal Is, As A Practice, Treated In Ways That Would Be Illegal If It Were A Dog Or A Cat.

If We Communicated With Something Like Music, We Would Never Be Misunderstood, Because There Is Nothing In Music To Understand.

I'm Interested In The Kind Of Religion That Makes Life Harder. I'm Not So Interested In The Comforting Kind Of Religion.

Why I'm Not Where You Are ...

When I Heard Your Organization Was Recording Testimonies, I Knew I Had To Come. She Died In My Arms, Saying 'i Don't Want To Die.' That Is What Death Is Like. It Doesn't Matter What Uniforms The Soldiers Are Wearing. It Doesn't Matter How Good The Weapons Are. I Thought If Everyone Could See What I Saw, We Would Never Have War Anymore.

Almost Always When I Told Someone I Was Writing A Book About "eating Animals", They Assumed, Even Without Knowing Anything About My Views, That It Was A Case For Vegetarianism. It's A Telling Assumption, One That Implies Not Only That A Thorough Inquiry Into Animal Agriculture Would Lead One Away From Eating Meat, But That Most People Already Know That To Be The Case.

And Yet And Yet - The Last Secret Of The Tree Of Codes Is That Nothing Can Ever Reach A Definite Conclusion. Nowhere As Much As There Do We Feel Possibilities Shaken By The Nearness Of Realization. The Atmosphere Becomes Possibilities And We Shall Wander And Make A Thousand Mistakes. We Shall Wander Along Yet Not Be Able To Understand.

As Long As I Am Thinking, I Am Alive.

We Spent Our Lives Making Livings.

Making A Living

We Aren’t Exactly Emptying The Oceans; It’s More Like Clear-cutting A Forest With Thousands Of Species To Create Massive Fields With One Type Of Soybean.

My Impression Is That Staying Together As A Couple Does Not Correspond To The Challenges Themselves, But Whether The Very Idea Of Breaking Up Is An Option On The Table. If It Is, Then Some People Take It. If It's Not, Then They Will Keep Working At It. You Must Know People Who Were Terribly Suited Who Make It Work. And There Are Couples Who Seem Perfectly Suited That Break Up. It's A Mystery To Everyone.

She Is Deranged, But So So Playful.

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