Grendel

Jul 13, 2007 23:36


     "It's good at first to be out in the night, naked to the cold mechanics of the stars. Space hurls outward, falconswift, mounting like an irreversible injustice, a final disease. The cold night air is reality at last: indifferent to me as a stone face carved on a high cliff wall to show that the world is abandoned. So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age. I lie there resting in the steaming grass, the old lake hissing and gurgling behind me, whispering patterns of words my sanity resists. At last, heavy as an ice-capped mountain, I rise and work my way to the inner wall, beginning on wolfslopes, the edge of my realm. I stand in the high wind balanced, blackening the night with my stench, gazing down to cliffs that fall away to cliffs, and once again I am aware of my potential: I could die. I cackle with rage and suck in breath.

" 'Dark chasms!' I scream fromt he cliff-edge, 'seize me! Seize me to your foul black bowels and crush my bones!' I am terrified at the sound of my own huge voice in the darkness. I stand there shaking from head to foot, moved to the deap-sea depths of my being, like a creature thrown into audience with thunder.

"At the same time, I am secretly unfooled. The uproar is only my own shriek, and chasms are, like all things vast, inanimate. They will not snatch me in a thousand years, unless, in a lunatic fit of religion, I jump."

Grendel 
by John Gardner

i like-a the way he talks. he reminds me a little of Ray Bradbury. maybe that's only because the way that Bradbury writes is beautiful also. i don't know how else to explain it. it's just beautiful, like a painting that reminds you of  a field of flowers, even if the painting is of a shoe. or a musical piece that makes you feel, just feel, for no particular explanitory reason. it just reacts to something already inside of you. it's like an expression of your soul that words--your words, anyway-- will not allow to be communicated. Poetry does this too, such as "The Rape of Leda," or "If I Could Describe"-- the latter of which, ironically, describes as well as possible these exact emotions that I am trying (rather pathetically) to display.

i suppose it's just time to face the facts: we can try all we want, but we will never be able to fully express ourselves, probably because we will never truly know ourselves. if we did, i think we would explode, or melt, or disintigrate, because there would be nothing left to live for.
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