The Heart of Truth

"And I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book and my eyes open panic-stricken in a world other than my own, because when I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it is amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I've been in the very heart of truth."

-Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud A Solitude

McGregor, Iowa

Trauma

What Cannot Be Held

"He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur.  He touched the cold and perfect teeth.  The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her.  Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from.  Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel.  He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh.  What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war.  What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can.  But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

"Consummation of Grief"

I hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and all the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines

it matters little

very little love is not so bad
or very little life

what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this

I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

-Charles Bukowski

Another Kind of Place Altogether

"The Reverend Peters makes a funny ticking noise with his tongue sometimes when he is thinking.  And he smokes cigarettes and you can smell them on his breath and I don't like this.

I said that there wasn't anything outside the universe and there wasn't another kind of place altogether.  Except that there might be if you went through a black hole, but a black hole is what is called singularity, which means it is impossible to find out what is on the other side because the gravity of the black hole is so big that even electromagnetic waves like light can't get out of it, and electromagnetic waves are how we get information about things which are far away.  And if heaven was on the other side of a black hole, dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren't or people would notice."

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 

Happiness is...

A Constitution of Iron

"All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who lived sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations.  Compared to White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without strength in their grip.  White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none.  In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them.  A constitution of iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures."

Jack London, White Fang

Lake Monona, Madison, Wisconsin