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It's a thick book, The Goldfinch is. I recently joked with someone that it was like carrying a brick in my Barnes & Noble bag as I walked out of the bookstore with it. It is, after all, nearly 800 pages long. A brick with the gold emblem for its 2014 Pulitzer embossed on the cover.
Sitting atop the black and copper herringbone of the Ottoman across the room from me, a half-dozen pink Post-It flags stick out from between its pages, marking passages that I might someday want to find again. A scant half-dozen from among the many memorable ones that I've encountered.
I joked, with the friend who recommended it, that the book was ruining my life because it was drawing me away from things that I really needed to be doing. Like eating, sleeping--you know. (Luckily, the breathing part had still been automatic.)
But the truth is, it's what has saved me, brought me through some very rough days. Rough waters, to put it another way. The kind you might only understand if you were somehow able to see into, or through, the eyes of the one sailing on them.
The kind in which it's entirely possible to drown. Meaning in the eyes or the waters, you choose.
At a little past halfway through it, Theodore Decker has encountered the older brother of a childhood friend with whom he'd stayed after his mother died. A childhood friend who'd hated sailing, not as a metaphor for life, but as the real life avocation and passion of his unstable father.
And Decker has just learned that the friend, having been forced to venture out in questionable weather, has drowned because his safety harness had come undone.
As I continue reading it, I'm hoping that this book--my own figurative harness--remains secure. That I may perhaps find others to follow after it, to help negotiate these waters until a calmer stretch can at last be found.
Or until I may finally swim away, knowing that the few others, still on board with me, may sail safely on...
LPK
Dreamwidth
9.23.2018
Sitting atop the black and copper herringbone of the Ottoman across the room from me, a half-dozen pink Post-It flags stick out from between its pages, marking passages that I might someday want to find again. A scant half-dozen from among the many memorable ones that I've encountered.
I joked, with the friend who recommended it, that the book was ruining my life because it was drawing me away from things that I really needed to be doing. Like eating, sleeping--you know. (Luckily, the breathing part had still been automatic.)
But the truth is, it's what has saved me, brought me through some very rough days. Rough waters, to put it another way. The kind you might only understand if you were somehow able to see into, or through, the eyes of the one sailing on them.
The kind in which it's entirely possible to drown. Meaning in the eyes or the waters, you choose.
At a little past halfway through it, Theodore Decker has encountered the older brother of a childhood friend with whom he'd stayed after his mother died. A childhood friend who'd hated sailing, not as a metaphor for life, but as the real life avocation and passion of his unstable father.
And Decker has just learned that the friend, having been forced to venture out in questionable weather, has drowned because his safety harness had come undone.
As I continue reading it, I'm hoping that this book--my own figurative harness--remains secure. That I may perhaps find others to follow after it, to help negotiate these waters until a calmer stretch can at last be found.
Or until I may finally swim away, knowing that the few others, still on board with me, may sail safely on...
LPK
Dreamwidth
9.23.2018
