More Shadows

And so I have moved on from honey to shadow. And when it comes to shadow, only one book comes to my mind. I read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping half a decade ago, & have no solid memories of the book. I do have a vague recollection that it was filled with shadows & reflections & isolation. But no more so than every day life is, merely more than books usually are.

Here are a few passages I rediscovered today dealing with shadows in a more theoretical way, though mostly what I recall is her ability to describe shadowy scenes.

"I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected - an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There never had been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind."

And...

"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again."