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Friday, March 21, 2003
This Wild Darkness
Several weeks ago I wrote a post about the excitement that I felt about my daughter’s impending reading of To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time, and about the feeling that you get when your read or hear or see something that is life changing or moves your soul. The feeling like you have just come out of a tunnel and you need to look around to see that the world has changed. And what you realize is that the world didn't change, you did.
Anyway, I received a massive amount of email about that post (I'm still receiving it) and I want to thank everyone who wrote in and apologize to those to whom I didn't reply. There are only so many hours in the day and snark never sleeps.
I did receive one email from a regular responder (as well as contributor to others blogs as well as mine). Rich Procter sent me a quote from a book I had never read by an author whom I had never paid much attention to: Harold Brodkey. I had heard about Brodkey, mainly in reference to his magnum opus The Runaway Soul, which is considered by some to be a messy work of genius, but I had never read him other than a few magazine articles or short stories. Before Brodkey passed away in 1996 from the AIDS virus, he completed a book called This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. The book is a journal, essay, and testament where Brodkey chronicles his last days and reflects on his life and his looming death. Rich was kind enough to point me in the direction of this book, which is unfortunately out of print, however I was able to obtain a copy. The book is a wonder and well worth the time if you can find a copy.
Having said all that, I'd like to share the quote that Mr. Procter sent to me. In light of what is happening in the world right now, it is a small thing, a sliver of light, to light up the darkness:
"One may be tired of the world -- tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality -- while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely real, without miracle -- or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. The knowing, the taut balance, the jolts and instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me."
~Harold Brodkey 1930-1996
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