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Tuesday, July 14, 2009
A Brief History of the Dead.
One can always tell how much I like a book on my shelf by how many dog-eared pages it has. Every time I come across a beautifully written prose, a thought of the author that struck me, or a word that I like, I would make a small fold at the edge of the page. By this standard, I think I've found my favourite book. This is a book found not adorning the best-selling shelves of the bookstore, but quietly lying on a pile of discarded preloved. I wouldn't have taken a second look at the pile should the boyfriend didn't need to grab something from the store.
Below is an excerpt:
It had something to do with her sense that nothing is permanent, nothing would last. Hearts stopped beating, people put guns to their chests.
There is no one and nothing she could ever know well enough to make it stay. It had been one of the chief preoccupations during the last few years of her life: the notion that there was not enough time left for her to really get to know anyone. Most people would say that it was ridiculous. She understood that. She was only in her mid-thirties, after all.
But whenever she would come into contact with someone new, someone whose stories she didn't already know by heart, sooner or later that person would start talking about days gone by, and she would get the sad, sickening feeling that too much had already happened to him and it was far too late for her to ever catch up. How could she ever hope to know someone whose entire life up to the present was already a memory? For that matter, how could anyone hope to know her?
The way she saw it, the only people she had any prayer of knowing or being known by were the people who had been part of her life since she was a child, and she hardly even spoken to them anymore. As for everybody else she, well - there were too many shadows behind a person and there was too little light ahead...
... She could never be whole in the eyes of anyone else. No one else could ever be whole in her own eyes.
It is almost as if Kevin Brockmeier had penseived my mind and penned my thoughts more aptly than I ever could.
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