The Word 'Sorry' Has No Bottom
He reaches for apology and finds language itself giving way
There is a word I have avoided for the whole length of these confessions, and the word is sorry.
It seemed to me, for years, the smallest and most coin in the moral purse.
Children say it to end a scolding; the guilty say it to purchase a lighter sentence.
I had trained myself to at it, as a philosopher sneers at the crude tools of the crowd.
Yet now, when I reach for something to hold my remorse, this despised word is all I find.
And I discover, lowering myself into it, that the word has no bottom I can stand upon.
However far I into sorry, there is always a further deep of what I have not felt.
The I owe is larger than any sentence, and language keeps handing me sentences.
Words are counters of the shared and the sayable, and his death was singular and .
To name my sorrow is already to shrink it, to fold the infinite into a phrase I can pronounce.
The is not a flaw in my particular words but a limit written into words as such.
I could apologise in every language I have translated, and the sum would still fall short.
There is a silence past the last word, and it is in that silence that the real waits.
But I cannot simply be silent, for silence, uninhabited by remorse, is only again.
So I must speak, knowing the speech will fail, and let the failure itself become the meaning.
Sorry, said honestly, is not a claim to have paid the debt but a confession that it cannot be paid.
It points beyond itself, the way a finger points at a moon it can never touch or contain.
I had wanted words to master my experience, to file it neatly under a governing idea.
Now I want only words enough to admit that they arrive too late and too small.
, I begin to suspect, is not a thing one completes but a direction one faces forever.
The word sorry is a door left open onto a room whose far wall keeps receding as you walk.
And perhaps that endlessness is the point, the guarantee that the debt is treated as real.
A sorry with a bottom would be a sorry that ends, and a grief like this should never end.
I once measured my genius by how completely I could say a thing; now I measure it differently.
The truest sentence I have ever formed is the one that openly confesses it cannot .
I say sorry into the dark of the cell, and the dark does not answer, and that is just.
No echo comes back to reassure me that the account is settled, because it is not and must not be.
For the first time, a word has defeated me, and in its defeat I feel almost, dangerously, human.