The Road / Cormac McCarthy

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don't you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
"To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce

"If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed,
except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I."
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship"

Friday, December 17, 2010

Chapter 3: Winter

It was like dying, this watching the world recede into deeper and deeper blues while the snow piled; silence swelled and extended, distance dissolved, and soon only concentration at the largest shadows let me make out the movement of falling snow, and that too failed.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This sentence becomes lovelier as I reread it. The tremendous and yet subtle beauty outweighs the initial sense of wonder, that mild feeling of confusion because the words are simply too gorgeous to take it all in at once. I like that Dillard compares her experience of watching a "curious nightfall" to dying and not death. Because they are two very different matters. It's like love and loving; there is a fine line between the two sets of truth. The gerund, then, is more profound than its original word. 
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