Calm to my Chaos |
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Friday, April 18, 2003
"You can make a sad song happy, And a bad world good..." - Tracey Thorn from My Head Is My Only House Unless it Rains Also, Happy Birthday Andrea! Sunday, April 13, 2003
I finally finished You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers this weekend. Overall, a tolerable read. As I read it, all I could think was... damn, this guy needs an editor bad. But, in the end, I think I realized that the stream-of-consciousness style was intended as an effect. So, while it was a bit heavy to wade through at points, I think overall, the idea came across somewhat clearly. He does have an amazing talent for word choice, I will certainly give him that. And, I will definitely be bumping A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius up on my reading list. But, first, it's on to The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. It's from Robb's little self-help collection and I think I'm probably worried to know why it is he thinks I should read it. But, I won't bog us down with deeper issues. Here is the last of the gems from YSKOV... + "Love is implicit in every connection. It should be. Thus when absent it makes us insane." + A mental diatribe delivered by the narrator, Will, which I think examines in a very dramatic way how overwhelming a life full of choices can actually be... "Jack, I never told you this but for so long I've wanted something like that, I wanted to have some kind of boundary, and this part you will hate but before you were gone and even after, I daydreamed about car crashes. I wanted so many times while driving to flip, to skid and flip and fall from the car and have something happen. I wanted to land on my head and lose half of it, or land on my legs and lose one or both -- I wanted something to happen so my choices would be fewer, so my map would have a route straight through, in red. I wanted limitations, boundaries, to ease the burden, because the agony, Jack, when we were up there in the dark was in the silence! All I ever wanted was to know what to do. In these last months I've had no clue, I've been paralyzed by the quiet, and for a moment something spoke to me, and we came here, or came to Africa, and intermittently there were answers, intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving but just as often there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next." + And, to end, a thought that could not ring more true... "Advice so rarely finds its intended audience." 
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