Anne Carson | Liberty

Liberty means different things to different people.

I have never liked lying in bed in the morning.

Law did.

My mother does.

But as soon as the morning light hits my eyes I want to be out in it-

moving along the moor

into the first blue currents and cold navigation of everything awake.

I hear my mother in the next room turn and sigh and sink deeper.

I peel the stale cage of sheets off my legs

and I am free.

Out on the moor all is brilliant and hard after a night of frost.

The light plunges straight up from the ice to a blue hole at the top of the sky.

Frozen mud crunches underfoot. The sound

startles me back into the dream I was having

this morning when I awoke,

one of those nightlong sweet dreams of lying in Law’s

arms like a needle in water - it is a physical effort

to pull myself out of his white silk hands

as they slide down my dream hips - I

turn and face into the wind

and begin to run.

Anne Patricia Carson CM (1950) is a highly acclaimed Canadian classicist, poet, essayist and translator.

She was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature".

She is the third Canadian-born writer to receive this distinction, following Saul Bellow (1976) and Alice Munro (2013).

Goblins, devils and death stream behind me.

In the days and months after Law left

I felt as if the sky was torn off my life.

I had no home in goodness anymore.

To see the love between Law and me

turn into two animals gnawing and craving through one another

towards some other hunger was terrible.

Perhaps this is what people mean by original sin, I thought.

But what love could be prior to it?

What is prior?

What is love?

My questions were not original.

Nor did I answer them.

Mornings when I meditated

I was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul,

not the complex mysteries of love and hate...