The Heaviness of Life — Against the Demand for Ease
Life becomes thick easily. Not necessarily tragic in the grand, literary sense, and not only through the unmistakable presence of grief, illness, or catastrophe. A week can acquire weight through ordinary accumulation: a body that needs sleep, work that makes a further demand just as another is met, a relationship that contains both refuge and obligation, a decision whose consequences cannot be known until they arrive. The surprise is not that this happens. It is that we keep treating it as evidence that something has gone wrong. …