Waiting

I hated waiting.  If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation.  I expected--an arrival, an explanation, an apology.  there had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.  That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility hat the next moment might be utterly different.  And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention.  Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Shenendoah

New Books

Transients, All of Us

"It was because of his tolerance of transients that they haunted the town as they did, sleeping in abandoned houses and in the ruins of fallen houses, and building their shanties and lean-tos under the bridge and along the shore.  They seldom spoke in our hearing or looked at us directly, but we stole glimpses of their faces.  They were like the people in old photographs -- we did not see them through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred as they were startled or blank."  

Burnside's Bridge

"Like the dead, we could consider their histories complete, and we wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting, since their lives as drifters were like pacings and broodings and skirmishings among ghosts who cannot pay their way across the Styx.  How ever long a postscript to however short a life, it was still no part of the story.  We imagined that if they spoke to us they would astonish us with tales of disaster and disgrace and bitter sorrow, that would fly into the hills and stay there in the dark earth and in the cries of birds.  For in the case of such pure sorrow, who can distinguish mine from thine?"

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Foreshadowing

"For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires.  To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.  For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?  And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole.  For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it.  So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.  though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Harper's Ferry

Credibility

"Does happiness strain credibility?  Is there something in the human spirit that distrusts its own appetites, its own yearning for healing and contentment?"

-Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

Maryland-Virginia Overlook, February 2014

Mystery Finally Claims Us

"My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer some quiet benediction and call it the end.  But truth won't allow it.  Because there is no end, happy or otherwise.  Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved.  The facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of conclusion.  Mystery finally claims us.  Who are we?  Where do we go?  The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story.  There is no tidiness.  Blame it on the human heart.  One way or another, it seems we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows.  Our whereabouts are uncertain.  All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe."

-Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

February 2014

"Night Gleam"

Over and over thru the dull material world the call is made
over and over thru the dull material world I make the call
O English folk, in Sussex night, thru black beech tree branches
the full moon shone at three AM, I stood in under wear on
the lawn --
I saw a mustached English man I loved, with athlete's breast
and farmer's arms,
I lay in bed that night many loves beating in my heart
sleepless hearing songs of generations electric returning in-
telligent memory
to my frame, and so went to dwell again in my heart
and worship the Lovers there, love's teachers, youths and 
poets that live forever
in the secret heart, in the dark night, in the full moon, year
after year
over & over thru the dull material world the call is made.


16 July 1973

from Mind Breaths, by Allen Ginsberg