The Worst You Ever Feel

Until he was ten, whenever Aaron was sick or bleeding, his father would say the same thing: “May this be the worst pain you ever feel.” –Rebecca Makkai’s “The Worst You Ever Feel” 

When I went to Mrs. Freeman's reading on that Wednesday night in the Garden Room, the line I remember and loved was this line. I understood. I've had such experiences. There need not be some intricate connection with Aaron, who can sense ghosts, nor his father who had felt all the pain of "getting out." ("And so what was wrong with getting out? Except that escaping is its own brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls that didn't save themselves.") I don't know much about the Communist takeover in the 1940s (not much about history, for that matter). But there must be some other attaching force that makes you nod your head, makes you stay up late, almost sense the ghosts Aaron does, feel the painful guilt of Aaron's father. 

Child's Play

It was one of those stories that make you stay up late, even though you know it's a school day and you'll regret the next morning wanting to sleep more. But I read on anyway. I thought I'd rather finish up a good story than wait until tomorrow. I'm one of those people who has to finish something right there and then or else I'll have wandering thoughts, out of nowhere, just like that. Well. I was almost done reading, I had one more page to go, so I flipped it, but that was it. The last page. The end. I uttered an obviously audible "oh" out loud, as though that would make appear a line I missed. But of course--the reason why Alice Munro's stories are so good is that she leaves you hanging, so blasé. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father. --Anna's sister in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Inredibily Close

"Sea frozen inside us"

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

Franz Kafka 

I used this quote to argue the value of books over that of films, but there is better reason I like this quote. I like Kafka. How Kafka feared his father so much he stuttered in his father's presence, how he was an insomniac and spent those long nights clinging to literature is reason enough. But ever since I read "A Hunger Artist" I could not but marvel at his storytelling. His translated version did not suffice; I wished to read it in its original German language. I think this was when the sea frozen inside me finally broke.