Thanksgiving morning.

Matt and the children are walking & scootering by the river with Mark and Sophia, and I’m at home putting the turkey in, etc. Also finished The Year of Magical Thinking. Wow. This book takes my breath away. I’m not quite able to articulate why, or how, so for now I’ll just cite a few passages:

“…even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…”

An excerpt by Gerard Manley Hopkins (I love the notion that the mind has mountains):

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come.

“In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.”

“Did mothers always try to press on their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed?”

“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

“Time is the school in which we learn.”

“I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portugese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that.”