I didn’t know it yet, but I was playing a game of “What I Am Not ” a game played by the Singer children in which they deny whole rooms, years, weathers. In Germany, I discarded the notion that friends are people who are just like me and began to seek out those who, instead, enriched my life with their differences. In France, I abandoned my fear of slowing down. In England, I let go of the person who needed a physical residence to feel safe. In each of those countries, I shed a layer of the person I used to be and became someone far happier. It was undertaken as a great act of rebellion against the forces that had begun to shape a life I felt uncomfortable living: one in which an endless cycle of work influenced everything from the clothes I wore to what I did on the weekend (which was, inevitably, more work). It had been only two weeks since my return from Europe, a journey that had spanned thirteen countries and eleven months. I’d started reading Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love on the plane that brought me back to my hometown. The Singer children, 15 year-old Alma and her younger brother Bird, had suffered a loss as well, albeit a fictional one: the death of their father from pancreatic cancer. I was standing alone in the Buhre Avenue station, waiting for the number six train to arrive and bring me downtown, where I would attend a going-away party for friends who would not be coming back, mourning a loss that had not yet occurred. The thought of removing my hat and scarf and gloves passed briefly through my mind, but there was a strange comfort in the excessive warmth, in the heat of the blood that rushed to my face. It poured down in sheets of cerulean, cascading over the steel of the subway car in hot, foamy waves. The rain was tropical, otherworldly, completely out of place for New York City in January. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion.” For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. “During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile.

The history of love by nicole krauss