Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
The greatest novel of our generation.
Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates itself, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sounds waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.
...
How can one man take on the memories of even one other man, let alone five or ten or a thousand or ten thousand; how can they be sanctified each?
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"But Athos, whether one believes or not has nothing to do with being a Jew. Let me put it this way: The truth doesn't care what we think of it."
...
"What is a man," said Athos, "who has no landscape? nothing but mirrors and tides."
...
Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion -- planned, timed, wired carefully -- not the burst door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant.
...
"Athos, how big is the actual heart?" I onced asked him when I was still a child. He replied: "Imagine the size and heaviness of a handful of earth."
...
English was a sonar, a microscope, through which I listened and observed, waiting to capture elusive meanings buried in facts. I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates itself, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sounds waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever towards the psalms.
...
How can one man take on the memories of even one other man, let alone five or ten or a thousand or ten thousand; how can they be sanctified each?
...
"But Athos, whether one believes or not has nothing to do with being a Jew. Let me put it this way: The truth doesn't care what we think of it."
...
"What is a man," said Athos, "who has no landscape? nothing but mirrors and tides."
...
Nothing is sudden. Not an explosion -- planned, timed, wired carefully -- not the burst door. Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms, so history is the gradual instant.
...
"Athos, how big is the actual heart?" I onced asked him when I was still a child. He replied: "Imagine the size and heaviness of a handful of earth."
...
English was a sonar, a microscope, through which I listened and observed, waiting to capture elusive meanings buried in facts. I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.