Sunday, September 12, 2010

Getting Closer


Two blocks away from my Portland apartment, there is a wonderful secondhand store with a wonderful name: Rerun. Beyond the eclectic array of inexpensive knickknacks, it maintains a respectable books section, too. A few days ago, I bought two hardback memoirs—Jamaica Kincaid's My Garden (Book) and William Kittredge's A Hole in the Sky—for a total price of $3.75.


I wasn't familiar with Kincaid's testimonial to gardening—I was mostly interested in the subject matter—but I had read an excerpt from A Hole in the Sky several years before, and had wanted to read it ever since. Since picking it back up, I've been far from disappointed.

An excerpt:

"I want this to be a story about the way a sense of connection to the energies of everything can sweep over us; and why I think that sense of connection is supremely valuable.

Through all of this I am most concerned to examine the possibility that I may come to die and feel myself slipping back into everything. I hope I may feel that such slipping back into things is proper while it is happening. I hope I will be happy in the going, though sometimes that seems only like another way of saying I'm frightened and furious. I want to be like the child for whom it was so simple to let himself go into affection for what we are. He loved it as we seem to in the beginning, on the doorstep of life, with a future so thick in second chances.

What a release it might be, falling back into the world as if through some gate that was reopened, into that time in which we felt ourselves seamlessly wedded to every thing, and every other thing, getting closer."

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