The End

excerpt from
The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
By: Sarah Manguso

There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else's.

This is the usual sort of book about illness. Someone gets sick,
someone gets well.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more
significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the
dimensions of a self.

Most people consider their own suffering a widely applicable
model, and I am no exception.

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come to you in a form you do not recognize.

you might not know how to love it.

But to pay attention is to love everything.

To see the future as brightness

Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see
things only as their own fatal brightness, and there is nothing
after that brightness.

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing.

You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are
moved, as brightness, into brightness.