May 19, 2007
They know about love
“They know after all this time about love– that it’s dim and unreliable, and little more than a reflection on the wall. It is also capricious, idiotic, sentimental, imperfect, and inconstant, and most often seems to be the exclusive preserve of others. Sitting in a room that was slowly glowing dark, they found themselves wishing they could measure its pure anchoring force or account for its random visitations. Of course they could not– which was why, after a time, they began to talk about other things: the weather, would it snow, would the wind continue its bitter course, would the creek freeze over, would there be another power cut, what would happen during the night.” -Carol Shields, “Others”
May 19, 2007
Tempus does not fugit
“And then, suddenly, I realized it meant nothing. Tempus did not fugit. In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time. There is time to sit on a houseboat for a month reading novels. There is time learn another language. There is travel time and there is stay-at-home time. Shallow time and fallow time. There is time in which we are politically involved and other times when we are wilfully unengaged. We will have good years and bad years, and there will be time for both. Every moment will not be filled with accomplishment; we would explode if we tied ourselves to such a regimen. Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love. This was not a mountain we were climbing; it was closer to being a novel with a series of chapters”- Carol Shields, “Afterword” from Dropped Threads
I love this. Though Shields’ own tragically shortened life gives this a sad resonance, I think it still stands. Though there is never enough time, at the same time life is long. Every day is bursting with hours, and weeks with days. That you make the time you have enough. And I love that idea– if I only had a houseboat.
April 25, 2007
Encountering the great unread
“People shouldn’t worryabout disliking books widely accepted as great, or avoiding them for decades. They should wait for that stage when they are ready for the book, for it will come. I have read with such excess all my life that I could always use the excuse that I had another book on the go. I didn’t know this when I was young, but I would still have plenty of time to encounter the great unread.” -Heather Mallick, “Lessing is More”
April 24, 2007
A Stock of Stories
“When they tell these stories to friends (as they sometimes do) Brenda never says to Jack, ‘Please don’t tell that old story again,’ and he never says to her, ‘We’ve all heard that one.’ They love their stories and tacitly think of them as their private hoard, their private stock, exquisitely flavoured by the retelling. The timing and phrasing have reached a state of near perfection; it’s taken them years to get them right. It seems to Brenda that all couples of long standing must have just such a stock of stories to draw upon”. -Carol Shields, Happenstance
