Saturday, July 18, 2015

Letter Tapestries

It's been ages since I picked up a book (and finished it) for the pure pleasure of reading.  Moons have birthed baby moons and those moons have spawned a GenX of new moonies since the time I gobbled words and thrust them promiscuously down my aching throat.  Not for research, not purposeful... merely ephemeral with no thought of anything else but losing my identity in the spun threads of letter tapestries.


Among Others by Jo Walton - Dedication Page

"I want to be a scientist," she confided.
"A scientist?"
"Yes.  A real one.  I was reading the other day about Lavoisier.  You know?"
"He discovered oxygen.  With Priestley."
"Well, and he was French.  He was an aristocrat, a marquis.  He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he'd keep blinking his eyes after his head was cut off, for as long as he had consciousness.  He blinked seventeen times.  That's a scientist."
She's weird.  I like her. 

"Oh dark, dark, dark... those are the pearls that were his eyes... With these fragments have I shored up my ruins." 

"I reached out to the knife with my hand.  Whatever else it was, it was wood, and wood loves to burn, burning is in the pattern of wood, the potential fire that is the sun's fire.  The sun was setting, but the wood  leapt to flame, and I was flame, I was a flame contained in my own shape for a moment, and then I was a huge flame.... we weren't near the door to death but I was fire and she was fire and I had the pattern and I loved her.  She was not me, but she was in my heart, she always would be.... and though she was flame she smiled her real smile. ...I opened a space between the flame and where death fell in the pattern, and I hurled her through it, knife and all, and then I closed it up again and sank down, dampened the flame until I was in my own shape again."

"And here I am, still alive, still in the world.  It's my intention to carry on being alive in the world, well, until I die... I'll live, and read, and have friends, a karass, people to talk to.  I'll grow and change and be myself.  I'll belong to libraries wherever I go.  Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets...Things will happen that I can't imagine.  I'll change and grow into a future that will be unimaginably different from the past.  I'll be alive.  I'll be me.  I'll be reading my book.  I'll never drown my books or break my staff.  I'll learn while I live.  Eventually I'll come to death, and die, and I'll go through death to new life, or heaven or whatever unknowable thing is supposed to happen to people when they die.  I'll die and rot and return my cells to life, in the pattern, whatever planet I happen to be on at the time.

That's what life is, and how I intend to live it."

Good stuff. 


Talk of our dreams, you surely have one
Temples // Keep in the Dark b/w Jewel of Mine Eye //  2013





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