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"

Monday, January 3, 2011

Chapter 12: Nightwatch

A bobwhite who is still calling in summer is lorn; he has never found a mate. When I first read this piece of information, every bobwhite call I heard sounded tinged with desperation, suicidally miserable. But now I am somehow cheered on my way by that solitary signal. The bobwhite's very helplessness, his obstinate Johnny-two-notedness, takes on an aura of dogged pluck. God knows what he is thinking in those pendant silences between calls. God knows what I am. But: bobwhite.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In the margin I had written, "a sad, scientific truth." But as I type Dillard here, I think again. Sadness is no longer; hope replaces sadness. I imagine a bobwhite singing, singing, singing for his love and when he is not, he is hoping, hoping, hoping. You still sing because of hope. Without it you would stop singing altogether. (And you'd be called bobblack or bobbrown or bobguacamole or some other bob-hopelessness.) But what extra breath and chance you're taking to sing-- with that "dogged pluck"! 
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