in the skin of a lion

The third time I'm delving in, each time reaching new depths. And clarity. This book that had always eluded me has now been undressed somewhat. It will eventually lose its magic- it has started with this reading- but I have lost no awe because most novels do not take three readings to own.

A passage:
The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: 'Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.' Meander if you want to get to town.

And what's amazing is that the novel has few characters, and as is often the case, they are linked. But the passage above is very much describing the novel in which it is embedded. The story is very human, the order faint, but there is nothing negative to be said about the time it takes to tell the story. I wish it would go on longer. I think what had happened before is that I was so seduced by the words that I was not capturing the story- my senses were saturated by the beauty. The third reading has allowed the beauty to dissipate like mist and reveal the reality (in a fictional sense)of the world he creates.

In a word, luscious.

I will reread The English Patient next. I want to understand how the characters that transcend the two novels leap from one fictional reality to another.

For those who have read either- in a word?

kindness

There is something about the raw display of kindness that shakes me at the core. There's a commercial on tv- one person helps a stranger on the street, and someone sees them, and the person who saw the good deed then does something nice for some other stranger on the street, and a chain effect begins. And the things are small- picking up the gloves they dropped- and sometimes obvious- pushing someone out of the way so they don't get buried under a tall stack of boxes that topples to the sidewalk. I am shaken.

I once saw something like that in person that, for some reason (actually, one that I remember) really stood out for me. Sitting in Bethesda in front of B&N, there was a guitarist playing on the sidewalk, a windy day, trash blowing all around this guy who was sort of tucked away in a little rounded corner (a nook) of the building. This one guy, from the audience, stands up, walks towards the singer, and he picks up the trash around him, he clears his space so that he can play without the trash blowing all around him. That's it- he picks up the trash, throws it in the bin, and sits back down. Shaken.

And it reminds me of the ultimate shake from kindness- the passage in The Grapes of Wrath that I cannot get enough of. Just a vague recollection of it shakes me- like the tickles kids feel when you haven't even touched them but have only hinted that you are going to tickle them. Here it is:

And here's a story you can hardly believe, but it's true, and it's funny, and it's beautiful. There was a family of twelve and they were forced off the land. They had no car. They built a trailer out of junk and loaded it with their possessions. They pulled it out to the side of 66 and waited. And pretty soon a sedan picked them up. Five of them rode in the sedan and seven on the trailer, and a dog on the trailer. They got to California in two jumps. The man who pulled them fed them. And that's true. But how can such courage be, and such faith in their own species? Very few things would teach such faith.

The people in flight from the terror behind- strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

blame me