kayleigh and i were talking about this after it came up in english lit class today, considering the dual nature of our collective reaction. it's symbolic: love is dead. if there was something good, it died a long time ago and may exist only as a curiosity in the fossil record-- it's pre-valentine's day, and we're bitter. also, it's hopeful: it's cute and moved us in that "aww" sort of way. plus the shakespeare entanglement. i don't know.

the word "neolithic" always instantly conjures associations with one of my favourite passages from haven kimmel, from the perspective of gods discussing humanity early on in her rewritten version of the book of revelation. it was painful to hold back from the conversation but simply too much to explain, and it's probably better just to read the whole thing. here's the part i copied out a while back:

"we loved watching her. they tell us time has passed and we believe them, and we know it must be difficult to imagine a genius in the neolithic era, no arts and letters, no mucking about with the atom, no cinema. hard to picture her there, rocked back on her heels at the edge of the water, contemplating the sublime and recognizing it as such without access to german philosophy of the enlightenment period, but that it what she did and who she was [...] she questioned what was inside and what was out. there was even in her physical comportment a harbinger of evolution not yet registered in the earth's mechanics: her forehead was smoother than her mother's, her arms were shorter, her back straighter.

but the moment we are thinking of, the one that caused us to let go a collective sigh that raised a tidal wave in an unoccupied coastal inlet in china, was the afternoon she sat on the beach with the small stones. she was solitary. she loved the company of her own mind, and rightly so. on this afternoon she was grieving the death of her third child, a hydrocephalic daughter born lumpen and covered with hair; the birth had split her mother stem to stern. during each pregnancy our beloved had searched for a stone, one as close to perfectly round as she could find, and before the stone was located she sat and drew circles in the sand with her fingertip; she drew them until a stillness settled in her solar plexus, quieting her, and she stopped when the stillness flowed down her arm and into the sand, and as soon as she had drawn the perfect circle the stillness flew into the air like a flock of startled seabirds, she could see them go, white, the sun a shock against their wings."

-- haven kimmel, "revelation," from killing the buddha: a heretic's bible