I met people when we lived down in Raleigh who’d ask where I grew up, and I’d say about two hours west of Asheville, and they’d say they didn’t know there was any North Carolina two hours west of Asheville. It was in many ways an isolated place.
I remember my father checking on a mountain kid who hadn’t been coming to school. My father had this beautiful Harris tweed overcoat. He came back with a knife cut all down one side. The parents had told him it was none of his business why their son wasn’t going to school.
She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.
They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment.
Take a king or a president or anybody. Put a heavy sack of gold in one hand and a feather-light declaration about freedom in the other. And then an outlaw sticks a pistol in his face and says give me one or the other. Every time – every ten out of ten – he’ll hug the sack and throw away the ideals. Because the sack’s what’s behind the ideals, like the foundation under a building.
You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.
Children don’t judge their own lives. Normal for them is what’s laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.
You try your best to love the world despite obvious flaws in design and execution and you take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you during your passage through it. Otherwise you’re worthless.
In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks.
There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life.
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.
Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment’s lost attention, and it’s all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt. Then mankind retreats to the caves, leaving little behind but obelisks weathering to nubs like broken teeth, dissolving to beach sand.
The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he had counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.
If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday.
He floated along thinking he would like to love the world as it was, and he felt a great deal of accomplishment for the occasions when he did, since the other was so easy.
I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She’s still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she’ll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made.
Humans are inhuman, whether it’s by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.
How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we’re mostly high-pitched and crazy. All urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that’s why we do dangerous and embarrassing things, as if simultaneously we’re immortal and going to die tomorrow. And that’s why we look back on that time so fondly from the dimmer years to come. Remembering the days when we were like Greek gods. Mighty and idiotic.
Never acknowledging that the general culture is often stupid or evil and would vote out God in favor of the devil if he fed them back their hate and fear in a way that made them feel righteous.
Remembering doesn’t change anything – it will always have happened. But forgetting won’t erase it either.