Friday, May 04, 2007

I Think I See a Light and Why I Love Reading

Well, I was up until 2am writing a final for my class, then I got up at 7:20 to make cupcakes for my friend's birthday lunch. I'm beat. My two big papers are done, now I just have tons of grading and reading to do. I was doing an awesome independent study this semester, but I think I had an overly ambitious reading list and I know I should have somehow (I'm not sure when) done more on it during the semester. I've got six books left that I want to read--most of them are over 300 pages. Blurg. But, on the bright side just when I was completely disconnected and a little bored with my book Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey, 1988), I came across this amazing passage:

"...he had an idea involving it, an idea that involved such a dreadful laceration of his own feelings that it is really hard to credit. And yet it was all born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light. The odds were surely stacked against him, and had it been a horse rather than a woman's heart he would never have bet on it, not even for a place."

Those last two sentences make me want to weep; they are so beautiful.

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