What’s The Point?

Via Erin’s Clishmaclaver

Too often, ‘what’s the point?’ played in the background of her mind like a song on an endless loop. It was there when she did the dishes, made the bed, picked up the mail. When absorbed in a task, it disappeared only to attack at an oblique angle when she was enjoying the satisfaction of finishing. ‘What’s the point?’ bled away the satisfaction, leaving a sad blankness in its place.

The only time it was ever completely silent was when she fed the animals. Dog and cat faces turned her way, intent on her every move; dog and cat bodies either still or tails thumping in anticipation. Once in a while, there would be a vocalization; a whisper woof or a quiet mew said with face turned away or looking down. That was as close as they ever came to asking and she knew that if she didn’t feed them, they would not be disappointed. They would wait, hopeful, but not demanding. When she looked at them, waiting to be fed, touched, loved, she always knew what the point was.

About Words

“For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.”

– Jeannette Winterson