"The Moor's Last Sigh"

[fiefoe]

The Moor's lament, as advertised:

• In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby's first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover's groan, unhappy lover's lament, miser's whine, crone's croak, illness's stench, dying whisper, and beyond the airless, silent void. A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
• 'I think, Sister, here comes Moo.' From Moo to Moor, from first groan to last sigh: on such hooks hang my tales.
  

The Moor calls the story of his love-life a 'bitter parable'. His parents' love-story started out better, but fared little better in the end. If love can be measured in its unwiseness, their loves are monumental.

• She scolded herself in blissful misery, and for a moment was so preoccupied by the sweet horror of her condition that...
• a sudden terrible apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was. 'Better, however, to win.'
• All that compacted humanity, in being pushed so tightly together that privacy ceased to exist and the boundaries of your self began to dissolve, that feeling which we only get when we are in crowds, or in love.
  
• What had happened was, in a way, a defeat for the pluralist philosophy on which we had all been raised. For in the matter of Uma Sarasvati it had been the pluralist Uma, with her multiple selves, her highly inventive commitment to the infinite malleability of the real, her modernistically provisional sense of truth, who had turned out to be the bad egg;
  
• Who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience. Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall.

'the fabulous turbulence of Crawford Market with its frieze by Kipling's dad'

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