I finished a really, really really great book the other day, The Living by Annie Dillard. Two things I liked: coming to know characters and then watching their lives unfold over a wild era, and learning how the Northwest was back in the day. Great stuff, truly. Here are a couple good bits from the book:
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Clare knew that common wisdom counseled that love was a malady that blinded lovers’ eyes like acid. Love’s skewed sight made hard features appear harmonious, and sinners appear saints, and cowards appear heroes. Clare was by no means an original thinker, but on this one point he had reached an opposing view, that loves alone see what is real. The fear and envy and pride that stain souls are phantoms. The lover does not fancy that the beloved possesses imaginary virtues. He knew June was not especially generous, not especially noble in deportment, not especially tolerant, patient, or self-abasing. The lover is simply enabled to see–as if the heavens busted open to admit a charged light–those virtues the beloved does possess in their purest form.
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It was not everybody got so deep into the battering and jabbing of it all, got in the path of the great God’s might. She moved across the burning plains, crossed two mountain ranges. She saw from the western shore with her own eyes the mild islands rolling off in the light, the way they must have looked at the foundation of the world. She called Lummi and Nooksack women her tillicums, and they called her tillicum, which who would have guessed. She lay under mats in the bottom of a canoe once during the Indian troubles, and Rooney told the Haidas she was clams. Lived in five or six different places, including a stockade. She felt her freedom. Reared two boys to manhood, busted open this wilderness by the sea, buried the men on their lands. She saw a white horse roll in the wild straberries, and stand up red. She took part in the great drama. It had been her privilege to peer into the deepest well hole of life’s surprises. She felt the fire of God’s wild breath on her face.
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Still later that August, during the first year of the panic, the good women of Goshen staged a tree-planting ceremony in the schoolyard, to beautify their world. The children, the mayor, and other townspeople assembled to plant two big-leaf maples, a linden, and–someone’s supreme inspiration–a Douglas fir. They were disappointed that so few men attended. The men, for their part, who had exhausted their youths and manhoods, crippled their backs, and sacrificed flesh, digits, and limbs at the task of clearing trees, marveled at the women’s zeal at planting trees, and reflected, not perhaps for the first time, that their partners and helpmeets seemed never fully to grasp the nature of their joint venture.
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The heavy rope pulled at him. He carried it to the platform edge. He hitched up on the knot and launched out. As he swung through the air, trembling, he saw the blackness give way below, like a parting of clouds, to a deep patch of stars on the ground. It was the pond, he hoped, the hole in the woods reflecting the sky. He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.
