New Moon

“I started to worry that I was traveling in a circle, a very small circle at that, but I kept going. I stumbled often, and, as it grew darker and darker, I fell often, too.”

Describing her futile search in the forest for her beloved Edward, who’s long gone, Bella also describes her state of mind as it swirls down into the black hole of depression. She’s completely unable to find a useful path ahead of her and wanders instead around her own sadness until it reaches up, catches her, and pulls her in.

“Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight—a lunar eclipse, a new moon. A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn’t cold.”

For Bella, the stars and planets line up to form a horribly bleak combination, a harbinger of doom. A new moon is when the sky is at its darkest, with no light shining from the body that orbits Bella’s world. The light of her life, Edward, is suddenly gone, and there’s no relief anywhere within the pitch black of the night sky, nowhere her darkened spirit can go for any glimmer of hope.

“Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does.”

At first an aimless teen, Bella’s life found purpose in connecting to a remarkable person, only to lose that person and the meaning of the relationship imparted to her life. After Edward leaves her, Bella wallows in deep mourning. The lonely sadness feels endless, and her symptoms continue for months. A slow healing process continues until she finally notices a change. Dimly at first, a light shines at the end of her tunnel of agony.

“I was not allowed to think of him. That was something I tried to be very strict about. Of course I slipped; I was only human. But I was getting better, and so the pain was something I could avoid for days at a time now. The trade-off was the never-ending numbness. Between pain and nothing, I’d chosen nothing.”

As she slowly emerges from months of depression, Bella begins to realize that she’s been using emotional emptiness to mask her sorrow. Her desire to feel alive again battles with her fear that the pain of loss will come flooding back. This is only the first step on her path back to health; she has a long way to go.

“Forbidden to remember, terrified to forget; it was a hard line to walk.”

Despite Edward’s promise that she’ll soon forget him, Bella can’t let go, and his memory remains bright and painful to her. More than the agony of remembering what she’s lost, Bella fears the utter emptiness of forgetting what she once had. She simply must remember Edward, even if that awareness blasts an emotional hole through her heart.

“It didn’t feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I’d grown strong enough to bear it.”

At first, Bella drifts through her life, uninvolved and distant from everything important to her. Her mind sleeps, and it doesn’t wake until she’s ready to face the agony of her loss. When the bad feelings surface, she returns to life; her willingness to suffer makes it possible for her to participate once more in things that matter to her.

“I tried to tell myself that the fear was pointless. I’d already lived through the worst thing possible. In comparison with that, why should anything frighten me now? I should be able to look death in the face and laugh. My stomach wasn’t buying it.”

To escape her anguish about Edward, Bella throws herself into interesting and possibly dangerous projects, like learning how to ride a motorcycle. She hopes in vain, though, that she’ll feel no fear: Once she’s involved in something thrilling, she becomes reinvested in living, and the fear means she wants to live. The irony is that she does so by risking her life.

“I was like a lost moon—my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation—that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.”

Her life falls into a new, much more pleasant routine than the depression of earlier months: To school and work is added the companionship of Jacob. Animating her is the desire to find ways of getting Edward’s voice back into her head. This gives her a purpose, but it’s still a way of resisting the loss she feels. No matter how upbeat she feels, she can’t move forward in life but must loop endlessly around her past memories.

So are you going to be my Valentine?’ […] ‘What exactly does that entail?’ I hedged.”

Though Bella loves Jacob and needs his friendship, she can’t bring herself to commit to him. Unable to abandon her connection to Edward, even when that looks completely hopeless, she refuses to move forward with someone else. She despises herself for giving Jacob false hope but cannot lie to him. They’re both caught in a situation that’s as much an entanglement as a friendship.

“One thing I truly knew—knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest—was how love gave someone the power to break you. I’d been broken beyond repair.”

As much as love can be ecstatic, love lost is agonizing. Bella’s life has become simple: If Edward is with her, she’s in Heaven; if he’s gone, she’s in Hell. If she had reservations about Edward, she might be able to walk away, but she accepts him completely, and the intensity of that devotion makes her totally vulnerable to him. If he doesn’t want to be with her, she’s at the mercy of her agony, and a gaping hole opens where her heart is.

“What kind of a place was this? Could a world really exist where ancient legends went wandering around the borders of tiny, insignificant towns, facing down mythical monsters? Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute truth? Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and ghost stories?”

She’s already accepted the presence of vampires in the world; now, she must accept werewolves as well. It’s one thing to have a strange anomaly embedded in one’s reality; it’s quite another when two such anomalies exist side-by-side, as if perhaps an entire world of mythical creatures hides behind the faces of ordinary humans. Even worse, two of Bella’s favorite people are these strange beings, and they’re enemies. It’s a lot to grasp at once.

“I still couldn’t turn a blind eye to what was happening, like Billy seemed to, but I couldn’t condemn Jacob for it either. Love didn’t work that way, I decided. Once you cared about a person, it was impossible to be logical about them anymore.”

Bella wrestles with her conscience about Jacob, the werewolf killing visitors to the area. She doesn’t know exactly what they’re up to, but she wishes it would stop, yet she can’t let them continue without knowing they’re being hunted themselves. Hers is a universal insight about friendship: Love makes us sympathetic to people, even if they’re doing bad things. We want to not punish their behavior but to protect them from it.

“‘Well, I’m so sorry that I can’t be the right kind of monster for you, Bella. I guess I’m just not as great as a bloodsucker, am I?’ I jumped to my feet and glared back. ‘No, you’re not!’ I shouted. ‘It’s not what you are, stupid, it’s what you do!’”

At first, Bella thinks wrongly that the werewolves are killing tourists. She can’t bear the idea that her beloved Jacob has turned into a creature that must kill innocents. It turns out that his pack kills vampires to stop them from attacking humans. Nonetheless, her words introduce a theme that will come to dominate the story as it arcs across the novels in the Twilight series: What matters to Bella, and what she believes should matter to everyone, is that a person’s shape is nothing compared with the quality of their heart and soul. She knows that Jacob and Edward are wonderful people; her frustration is that they can’t get along.

“No, Edward wasn’t a killer. Even in his darker past, he’d never been a murderer of innocents, at least. But what if he had been? What if, during the time that I’d known him, he’d been just like any other vampire? What if people had been disappearing from the woods, just like now? Would that have kept me away from him? I shook my head sadly. Love is irrational, I reminded myself. The more you loved someone, the less sense anything made.”

A central theme of the book is that all other priorities take a backseat to love. Bella loves both Jacob and Edward, and, in both cases, she puts her concern for them well above her worries about their possible misdeeds. Dawning in her mind is the realization that the people she cares about have legitimate reasons for doing things that upset outsiders; it’s an early part of her growing role as a mediator between the werewolves and the vampires.

“It was very strange, for I knew we were both in mortal danger. Still, in that instant, I felt well. Whole. I could feel my heart racing in my chest, the blood pulsing hot and fast through my veins again. My lungs filled deep with the sweet scent that came off his skin. It was like there had never been any hole in my chest. I was perfect—not healed, but as if there had been no wound in the first place.”

Bella’s search for meaning and purpose centers on her remarkable relationship with Edward. To reunite with him, even in a moment of extreme danger, is all that matters to her. She can die at this moment and feel that her life has been worthwhile. The wounds she has suffered are psychic, and they heal instantly simply because she’s with the person with whom she feels complete.

“Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty […].”

This quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet describes Romeo’s reaction to viewing Juliet lying in her tomb as dead. Uttered by Edward, it expresses his joy at seeing Bella during what he believes is the moment of his death. He thinks he’s in Heaven because she, whom he believes is dead, stands before him. Bella’s beauty comes as much from her soul as from her physical presence; in that sense, it’s eternal. What’s more, Edward doesn’t have to enter Heaven to be with her: Wherever she is, be it Heaven or Hell, is heavenly to him.

“‘I love a happy ending.’ Aro sighed. ‘They are so rare.’”

Vampire king Aro loves being both charming and ironic—he can indulge both at once, as he controls immense power over nearly everyone he talks to—and he’s pleased and surprised that Edward’s attempt at suicide has been prevented so elegantly by Bella’s sudden intervention. Her relationship with a vampire intrigues Aro, and he wants to see where it leads.

“They have a name for someone who smells the way Bella does to me. They call her my singer—because her blood sings for me.”

Bella’s blood has a fragrance that Edward can sense, and it’s so alluring to him that he’s had to make a titanic effort not to drink all her blood and kill her outright. Most vampires in that situation would slay her without thinking, but Edward’s willingness to forego that pleasure opens up for him a vastly greater one, the deeply spiritual connection that he shares with Bella. For Edward, behind the song of her blood is the music of her soul.

“Now and then, as he talked with Alice, he would lean down suddenly and kiss me—his glass-smooth lips brushing against my hair, my forehead, the tip of my nose. Each time it was like an electric shock to my long dormant heart. The sound of its beating seemed to fill the entire room. It was heaven—right smack in the middle of hell.”

In a single day, Bella has raced to Italy, saved Edward’s life, barely escaped execution by the Volturi, learned she’s on a death watch if she doesn’t soon transform into a vampire, and flies back across the world toward her home. Exhilarated by her reunion with Edward but exhausted and frightened, she finds herself immersed in both wonderful and terrible feelings. It’s another lesson for her about how painful love can be, yet she chooses her situation because having Edward in her life once again is worth all the agony.

“Edward, […] You can’t let this…this guilt…rule your life. You can’t take responsibility for the things that happen to me here. None of it is your fault, it’s just part of how life is for me.”

Because they love each other so much, Bella and Edward easily become wracked with guilt when their actions accidentally cause the other to feel pain. It’s guilt that drove Edward away; Bella can now see that clearly, and the guilt causes many more problems than it solves. She’s also talking to herself, since she assumed Edward left because she failed to live up to him. They both must forgive themselves, even as they easily forgive each other.

“I’m here, and I love you. I have always loved you, and I will always love you. I was thinking of you, seeing your face in my mind, every second that I was away. When I told you that I didn’t want you, it was the very blackest kind of blasphemy.”

Edward explains to Bella that he lied about his feelings in the hope that it would help her to live without him. This proved disastrously wrong, as he and she vastly underestimated their effect on each other. They realize that separation makes things much worse for both of them. Their fates thus are sealed, their lives thereafter permanently intertwined. Alone, they’re doomed, but together they can face anything.

“Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars—points of light and reason.… And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.”

Edward explains eloquently how important Bella is to him. Like her, his life held little value until they met and became utterly meaningless when they separated. He’s also describing how she feels about him. Theirs is a feeling of love distilled and focused until it centers on each other.

“What if you sincerely believed something was true, but you were dead wrong? What if you were so stubbornly sure that you were right, that you wouldn’t even consider the truth? Would the truth be silenced, or would it try to break through?”

The moment that Bella opens her mind to the possibility that she’s been wrong all along about Edward’s motives in leaving her is the moment when she transcends her old self-limiting assumptions. She perceives that Edward has loved her all along; she’s not unworthy of him if she’s completely stolen his heart from the beginning. Her I’m-not-good-enough attitude melts away in the blazing heat of the truth that she and Edward are simply two people who are perfect for each other. She doesn’t have to be enough for Edward when he’s already overwhelmed by his love for her.