who’s the real you? the person who did something awful, or the one who’s horrified by the awful thing you did? is one part of you allowed to forgive the other?
Secrecy flows through you, a different kind of blood. It’s as if you’ve eaten it like a bad candy, taken it into your mouth, let it melt sweetly on your tongue, then allowed it to slide down your throat like the reverse of uttering, a word dissolved into its glottals and sibilants, a slow intake of breath—
And now it’s in you, secrecy. Ancient and vicious, luscious as dark velvet. It blooms in you, a poppy made of ink.
You can think of nothing else. Once you have it, you want more. What power it gives you! Power of knowing without being known, power of the stone door, power of the iron veil, power of the crushed fingers, power of the drowned bones crying out from the bottom of the well.
What big arms you have. All the better to hug you with. Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave the kiss she owed him. What big teeth you have! She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamor of the forest’s Liebestod, but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered: All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht and the old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering, but she did not pay them any heed.
Part of the reason I’m so good at undercover work is that I actually like being other people. There’s a lot I’ve done that I regret. When I leave the other identity behind, whether I slip out from underneath it voluntarily or it’s ripped from my grasp. It always hits me like a shock. Like being awakened from a deep sleep back to who I really am. On my birth certificate: Natasha Romanoff. On my S.H.I.E.L.D. Dossier: Black Widow. And no matter what the circumstances…it’s good to be home.
There are wolves in the night. Soldiers would say that when I was a girl…There are wolves, they would say. And there are stories about wolves and girls. Girls in red. All alone in the woods. And about to get eaten up... Wolves and Girls. Both have sharp teeth.
I discovered the writer, Leo Tolstoy, in a ditch that held more blood than rain. One of the soldiers loved his words—and then, so did I. “All, everything that I understand,” he wrote, “I understand only because I love.”
That was so many years ago. But words on a page didn’t teach me that lesson. I learned it on my own. I learned it in trenches with bullets flying overhead; pressed back to back with grizzled starving men who would have laid down their lives for mine. I learned it from a ribbon tied around my ring finger. I learned it from a kick inside my belly. I learned it from death, and hardship, and brief acts of inexplicable kindness. I learned love from sacrifice. I learned love from living. And no matter where I’ve gone, or what I’ve done—all the dark things I do not regret, but will never speak of—that is the one part of me that I have always kept safe. Imus was such a fool.
Tolstoy will live forever. Some people do. But that’s not enough. It’s not the length of a life that matters… just the depth of it. The chances we take. The paths we choose. How we go on after our hearts break.
Hearts always break. And so we bend with our hearts. And we sway. But in the end… what matters is that we loved… and lived.
One with the environment. One of the most valuable skills in espionage. You can gear up with the best swag out there. Put on camo, tech, weaponry... But it is the unteachable skill to belong anywhere. The other edge of what is the unfortunate truth: You must first belong nowhere.
Finally, she said, “In Russia, in the Red Room, there were dozens of us. All girls, all young. We lived together. They let us be friends. Then they dropped us in the tundra, two weeks’ walk from home, with just enough supplies for one of us to survive.”
As living spies, we must recruit men who are intelligent, but appear to be stupid; who seem to be dull, but are strong in heart; men who are agile, vigorous, hardy, and brave; well-versed in lowly matters and able to endure hunger, cold, filth, and humiliation.
Historically, the routine of espionage is generally directed to obtaining something (information) or neutralizing something (people or property) in the homeland or conquered territory of a particular enemy.
But it is also a culture of sorts wherein the end not only justifies the means, but also serves as a kind of furtive absolution wherein the proscribing character of espionage — at least in the eyes of the spy and his own country — is marginalized due to its ostensible importance to national survival.
This mindset was particularly well put in a 1775 letter of Nathan Hale who observed: “Every kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary.”
We have to live without sympathy, don’t we. That’s impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really. I mean…one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold.
In the spy novel, as in real life, there are generally three ways of exposing a conspiracy. One is for any of the participants in the conspiracy to break with it and to expose his or her involvement. This takes an extremely courageous individual and, while it may occur in fiction, its occurrence in real life is somewhat rarer. The second means of exposure involves individuals who have unknowingly participated in the conspiratorial planning of an event but who did not realize it until later. These individuals, also a very small real world number, will expose the inner workings of the conspiracy at great peril to themselves. The final method of exposing a conspiracy is for a single investigator, or a small group of investigators, to uncover conspiratorial designs in the events of the past or seemingly unrelated events of the present, or, perhaps, a combination of both. This is the approach favored by most genre authors.
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quotes.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
inspo.
no subject