When I started up the trail to the swimming hole, there they were again, the little blue butterflies. My friend even commented on them. At the falls, they were everywhere, fluttering around haphazardly. The kids kept holding out their fingers and they would land, delicate able blue wings. We would examine them. The wispy blue butterflies have been a memorable feature of the summer. There were even some in Maine. I was surprised to see them there. One or two even managed to find their way inside the tent. They highlight something now missing in my life. I can't really find the word for it, or maybe there is no word for it.
I finished All the Light We Cannot See last night. The story captivated me until the last fifty pages, then it lost the tightly stitched narrative that drove it, and the story lost me a little. As a writer, I feel like I understand what happened. It took him ten years to write it, and, in the final fifty pages, it felt forced. I get like that sometimes, where I want to force the story forward before it is ready to give. It is this strange dance within the creative process. It's the ebb and flow. The story is in the driver's seat, not you or not some deadline. It has to unfold in its own time. Every time I try to resist that, I end up deleting a large chunk of what I wrote and resting my head on the table defeated. That is true for me with yoga too. There are parts of my body that are not ready to give, my hamstrings. They may never budge an inch. But I have learned to wait at the edge, patiently for the unfolding. When I force and push, I injure myself. Running is the same. That place where you are vulnerable and open and teetering at the edge, looking over the edge of the beautiful canyon, not falling. It's a fine balance. The more yoga and running and writing I do, the more I understand what it feels like to inhabit that space. There is a silent humming in my heart when I get there.
Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize, so obviously it was still a magnificent book but it didn't seem to end the way it was supposed to end. I felt it in my bones. Half of the story was about a blind girl coming of age in the disarray of war. She is brilliantly portrayed, her innocence, without vision, she is guided by other, often more important things. You experience the saturation of sound, texture and smell with her. There is a parallel story about a german orphan who is brilliant and gets drafted for his intellect into the war. He knows what he is doing is wrong but he feels like he has no other choices. But he is complicit with the war in indirect ways and his choices that he knows are wrong change him and unravel him. The characters are so vivid and complex. He falls in love with Marie-Laure. There is this blind girls who has no vision or light in her vision and sees everything. And then there is this german boy who sees everything but the light that is all around him and within reach.
The song Claire de Lune, the one my son is teaching me on the piano, is a thread throughout the book. It is a catalyst for the climax of the book. It's funny how things can weave together like that.
I finished All the Light We Cannot See last night. The story captivated me until the last fifty pages, then it lost the tightly stitched narrative that drove it, and the story lost me a little. As a writer, I feel like I understand what happened. It took him ten years to write it, and, in the final fifty pages, it felt forced. I get like that sometimes, where I want to force the story forward before it is ready to give. It is this strange dance within the creative process. It's the ebb and flow. The story is in the driver's seat, not you or not some deadline. It has to unfold in its own time. Every time I try to resist that, I end up deleting a large chunk of what I wrote and resting my head on the table defeated. That is true for me with yoga too. There are parts of my body that are not ready to give, my hamstrings. They may never budge an inch. But I have learned to wait at the edge, patiently for the unfolding. When I force and push, I injure myself. Running is the same. That place where you are vulnerable and open and teetering at the edge, looking over the edge of the beautiful canyon, not falling. It's a fine balance. The more yoga and running and writing I do, the more I understand what it feels like to inhabit that space. There is a silent humming in my heart when I get there.
Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize, so obviously it was still a magnificent book but it didn't seem to end the way it was supposed to end. I felt it in my bones. Half of the story was about a blind girl coming of age in the disarray of war. She is brilliantly portrayed, her innocence, without vision, she is guided by other, often more important things. You experience the saturation of sound, texture and smell with her. There is a parallel story about a german orphan who is brilliant and gets drafted for his intellect into the war. He knows what he is doing is wrong but he feels like he has no other choices. But he is complicit with the war in indirect ways and his choices that he knows are wrong change him and unravel him. The characters are so vivid and complex. He falls in love with Marie-Laure. There is this blind girls who has no vision or light in her vision and sees everything. And then there is this german boy who sees everything but the light that is all around him and within reach.
The song Claire de Lune, the one my son is teaching me on the piano, is a thread throughout the book. It is a catalyst for the climax of the book. It's funny how things can weave together like that.
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