Funny how quickly six weeks can pass without an update; I’ve been meaning to finish my series on e-mail delivery, and maybe write more about some of the music and books I’ve been appreciating lately.
This passage from The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro caught me today:
She still says this every once in awhile.
“What I remember most is that I couldn’t touch you and wondering if you understood.”
Karin says yes. She understood. What she doesn’t bother to say is that back then she thought Rosemary’s sorrow was absurd. It was as if she was complaining about not being able to reach across a continent. For that was what Karin had felt she had become—something immense and shimmering and sufficient, ridged up in pain in some places and flattened out, otherwise, into long dull distances. Away off at the edge of this was Rosemary, and Karin could reduce her, any time she liked, into a configuration of noisy black dots. And she herself—Karin—could be stretched out like this and at the same time shrunk into the middle of her territory, as tidy as a bead or a ladybug.
I find myself returning to Munro’s stories even though I’m in the middle of reading a couple of other books right now, both for their emotional immediacy and how well their length and structure lends itself to my current schedule.