I just finished The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, and even though I've read it before, I really did enjoy it. It helped that I had a few spare hours at school on Wednesday to read...I love days like that.
Did you know that in 2008, Bob Dylan won his own Pulitzer for his, "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power”? Go figure. Shields also won the Pulitzer for this book, and she was shortlisted for the Giller (my fave).
Here are some snippets from the book that stood out for me:
"Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction."
The absent are always present...I believe this wholeheartedly. If they aren't always with me, if I don't carry a piece of them around with me everywhere I go, if I don't leave a part of myself behind when I've left, it's as if we never happened. A photograph, a souvenier, can only do so much to bring them back to you: memories really do have to own a piece of you to stick around.
"The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always dumping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals."
I've posted about my tendency to live in and for the future before. Present living is so not me. I try, believe me, I try, but I just prefer to imagine more and live there instead. I'm forever thinking about what's going to happen next, like where I'm going to go or what I'm going to do after my contract is up. For some reason, it's hard to just enjoy the time I have here and now and push tomorrow into the back of my head. I'm a planner by nature and perhaps I should just start to accept that instead of trying to change into a now worshipper. I wonder though if I'm unwilling to spend myself, stir myself and that's why I'm so comfortable outside of the present. Maybe my whole life is like a rehearsal...I'm preparing for something, I wonder when the big show is going to start.
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