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- Bits from Small Rain & Why I Liked them
Bits from Small Rain & Why I Liked them
Nothing profound, just the equivalent of Tumblr posting.
Cole Bubenik
February 10, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
Last week I wrote some rambling thoughts about Small Rain and so this week I thought I’d just pull apart a lot of the bits I underlined and starred as I read through the novel. As I’m trying to read more, I’m also trying to identify what I love about what I’m reading. I’m taking it from both a “wow this feels profound to me” and “wow I like this writing” perspective, hoping that by identifying good writing I’ll also be able to write something good of my own.
Anyway, here’s some of the bits I liked:
I’ve felt a tension I’ve grown familiar with, between desire to help and inhibition, I’ve felt it all my life; there’s a kind of moral paralysis I sometimes feel, a moral weakness I mean, one stands by and so is culpable.
I’ve felt this hard before, lol.
It had become engrossing, the pain, it had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence…
This way of describing pain feels so real that I had to underline/note it while I was reading. The way that any type of pain—physical or mental—can take on its own environment or way of existing feels so true to life.
How can I say what it did to me, it unmade me, unmade and remade me around itself somehow.
I love when writers are able to turn some ordinary sentence into something profound. There’s not a lot going on here, but then there's the repetition of unmade, separated by the comma, then the use of remade, then the use of somehow. I think often writers want to make some exacting sentence that tells the readers how to feel or what to takeaway, but truthfully much of life and the experiences that make up life, is unregistered, unknown, and unlearned. The main narrator is just putting words to this new sensation he’s feeling and so, in real time, he’s struggling to say something profound. Right now, at this point in the story, he only has the vague sense of what it all means to him.
I would ask them, is he at that pitch of extremity; and what is the small rain, isn’t it beautiful, the weird adjective, how can rain be small; and does he want it, the speaker of the poem, does he long for the rain, is that how we should understand the cracked syntax; and isn’t the poem more beautiful for it, for the difficulty, for the way we can’t quite make sense of it, settled sense, I mean, for how it won’t stay still; isn’t the non-sense what makes it bottomless, what lets us pour and pour our attention into it, what makes it not just a message…
Including because it’s the title of the book, and it’s likely what this is all really about. But also it reminds me of something a writing professor told our class once: how the great thing about writing is not in finding the exact right word but the exact wrong word. The way something can be described wrongly, grossly, or nonsensically, how that wrongness can feel true to the character and true to the story. Small rain, what is small rain? It is bottomless really, like good writing should be.
I had always been fat, except for a few years in my twenties when I ran three miles every day and lifted weights.
Just so true to me too lmao.
And this was followed by a desire that had nothing to do with my dick; they made me go soft, actually, that doesn’t happen to everybody but it does to me, it was a different kind of intensity I felt, it was like I wanted to dissolve into that atmosphere of filth I loved, and the agent of dissolution was sex, sucking and being fucked.
A lot of writers write badly about sex. A lot of gay writers (myself included) write badly about gay sex. I think I really love this idea of dissolving into the atmosphere of filth. There’s something the main narrator loves about dissolution, something freeing about it. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it feels like an important part of this novel.
All I want is infinite love, I thought now, from everybody, all the time.
GOD I had to stop reading this book and cry after reading this line.
…I thought, the recognition of primal fault, that death isn’t just something that happens to us but something we carry within us, our own deaths and the deaths of others, of worlds, the marvel is we have lasted so long. I thought all that was true and also I mistrusted it, it was despairful but there was a kind of comfort in it, everything inevitable, out of our hands, a question of wiring; it made us responsible and also blameless, both at once.
I really love the idea of death being something we carry within us. I think it’s true. I think one of the great equalizers we all have is that we all carry around with us the deaths that made us or the deaths that will make us or the deaths that will eventually be our own.
I ached to get away, ton be in a new place, to touch again the pleasures of singleness.
I pair this with the quote below because they’re designed to compliment each other. Truthfully they’re both part of the same stream of consciousness so of course they go together. But throughout Small Rain there is this sort of push and pull between the desire to be single or alone and to be connected to those around you. There’s a pleasure in the singleness, not just in the freedoms it gives you, but in the ability it allows you to make and remake the self.
I think it’s part of the complications of loving someone too. We think that we’re not supposed to feel those pushes or pulls when we’re in love, but we do. Admitting them is human, it brings us closer to understanding what we desire most from our loves.
It was happiness to live there with him, even our quarrels were happiness, I longed for all of it.
Again, this goes with the above quote: the push and pull between singleness and togetherness. To live with him, to long for that form of happiness. I love this idea of happiness not as a feeling but as a place or a moment in time. It was happiness it continues to be happiness.
…I think, what I care about most, devotion to the actual; and wanting too to pull away from the concrete, to make it representative. One wants to cherish an object in time and also nail it outside time…
Just some good thoughts about writing.
Why do we love what we love, why does so much fail to move us, why does so much pass by us unloved.
I feel like I’ve asked this in therapy and to myself a lot. Why do I love what I love? Why does so much pass by me unloved? I want to know the answer. Sometimes I really struggle with that question.
It was time that lay strewn across our yard, not just wood and leaves but the decades and decades they had lived, and I felt grief for the them, real grief, it knocked the air out of my lungs.
I used to have a big weeping willow (or dogwood) of a tree in our backyard growing up. I love the way its branches hung down; it looked majestic and magical, as if it was a plant from some fantastical world. I was so angry when my parents decided to cut it down and rip it out. They were tired of it blocking their path as they mowed the backyard. I remember thinking what a selfish thought to have: to tear something so old down simply because it blocks your progress. Didn’t you understand the history in front of you?
I wanted to say to her, you are unbearably young, too young for marriage; but I couldn’t say it, one never feels too young for love, even love that locks in a pattern for life. Maybe all love does that, I don’t know, maybe all love demolishes one pattern and sets another.
I truly do think all love demolishes one pattern and sets another. I think we are constantly being unmade and remade by love. Hey, maybe that’s part of what this novel is about!
Maybe everyone feels the way I do, that it takes an act of will to hang on to a life, maybe it’s a myth to think anyone fits so seamlessly there’s no chance of slipping free.
I feel this way. I hope others feel this way.
They were private tears, mine alone, I let the water wash them away too.
I loveeeee the concept of private tears. I’ve felt this sensation before but never really called it private tears. But some tears are private, a special thing for you alone to experience.
That was what we had built together, I thought, the real unprecedented thing, a happiness that was equally ours, his and mine, and falling asleep now meant falling into it, into the noise of contentment he made as he held me more tightly, his happiness that was my happiness too, my happiness that was his.
His happiness that was my happiness too. My happiness that was his. GOD I want to gnaw my fucking arm off reading that.
…and we watched as a German shepherd ran back to her and dropped a tennis ball at her feet, a good boy.
I too have done a lot of soul-searching and pondering about life while watching a German shepherd run after a tennis ball.
I mean, the questions about how to live, maybe only competing truths, and maybe that isn’t the same thing as no truths at all, maybe we have to take them as they come. But I don’t think I believe that either, I don’t know what I believe.
This is near the end of the novel and I love that our main narrator still isn’t sure. He’s almost sure he understands it, he is coming up with some understanding. He’s trying to make meaning right? But…really he’s just saying it. He doesn’t think he believes that. What does that mean really? What does it mean to not think you believe something? That you almost do, that you want to but can’t quiet get there? Then the inclusion of “I don’t know what I believe” the honesty in that statement feels important to the novel.
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