Excerpts I loved from
Everything is Illuminated by
Jonathan Safran Foer:
"4:525
The dream that we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod, without knowing why, and looked into my reflection in the water. I couldn't look away. What was the image that pulled me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then I recognized it. So simple. In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was affliction for which only our love was the cure..."
"Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say,
I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post:
I don't love you. Poem too long:
I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl:
I don't love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you:
I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.
If we were to open to a random page in her journal- which she must have kept with her at all times, not fearing that it would be lost, or discovered and read, but that she would one day stumble upon that thing which was finally worth writing about and remembering, only to find that she had no place to write it- we would find some rendering of the following sentiment:
I am not in love.
So she had to satisfy herself with the
idea of love- loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.
The boys, young men, men, and elderly of the shtetl would sit vigil outside her window at all hours of the day and night, asking of they could assist her with her studies (with which she needed no help, of course, with which they couldn't possibly help her even if she let them try), or in the garden (which grew as if charmed, which bloomed red tulips and roses, orange and restless impatiens), or if perhaps Brod would like to go for a stroll tot he river (to which she was perfectly able to stroll on her own, thank you). She never said no and ever said yes, but pulled, slackened, pulled her strings of control."
"But it wasn't the same recognition as the previous morning, when he saw his face in the Dial's glass eyes. He wasn't becoming older as part of some natural process, but being made old as a victim of his love, which was itself only one day old. He was a boy still, but no longer a boy. A man, but not yet a man. He was caught somewhere between his mother's last kiss and the first kiss he would give his child, between the war that was and would be."
"And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of ideas with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended."
"... The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present. He, Safran, marked the division between what was and what would be."
Reading a great novel is like opening up a world in which our thoughts are mirrored through the creation of another. Realities are materialized through the construction of stories. (Stories we tell ourselves or tell to others. Stories that explain who we are, where we are from, and where we are going.) Some will strike us as odd, others we will feel as though we have written the words ourselves. Foer's novel, revealing the feelings of raw reality, is one I find myself in. As foolish as it is, I often wonder if the kinds of thoughts developed are not the product of some kind of link between souls who know and live similar stories. The materialization of minds that behold the same truths. And in reading a novel such as this, I find that I am truly inspired.
Peace
Mandy
