Ephemerality

truth and beauty (#3)

30 Day Challenge

I never quite know how to talk about my favorite books. I love them all, and for different reasons. If I just had to talk about one, I think it would have to be Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. 

It’s hard for me to explain exactly why I love it so much. I read it during the August after I graduated from undergrad. I was a little lost. I had moved to New York City, and I had just gotten a job. A boring dead end office job who’s sole selling point was the ability to begin earning money for a life in New York. And there are great swaths of Truth and Beauty  that are really about figuring out what to do with a life. It’s about being young, being unsure, and it’s also about a friendship. It’s also filled with this writing, moments that jumped off the page and at me. When I finished the book, I sobbed - big, unending tears at the horrible cruelty of life and the beauty that can be found in the writing.

I say it’s my favorite because it’s the book, since reading it, that I find myself returning to most often. I don’t often reread books. But I reread this one. When things go bad, or good, I will find myself craving certain specific passages. 

I don’t have my copy on me at the moment so I’ll have to rely on other sources for some of my favorite quotes:

“Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.” 

“what she wanted was love, and the best way to go looking for it was through sex. but it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. i understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. i couldn’t ever remember being lonely before, certainly not in this way, until i had seen the edge of all the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad of ways that person could never be there for you.”

“lucy’s loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity. if she emptied out grand central station and filled it with people she knew well, the people who loved her, there would be more than a hundred people there. but a hundred people in such a huge space just rattle around…you could pack in thousands and thousands more people, and still it wouldn’t feel full, not full enough to take up every square inch of her loneliness. lucy thought that all she needed was one person, the right person, and all the empty space would be taken away from her. but there was no one in the world who was big enough for that.”

“I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn’t have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn’t that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write?”

I bought The Hunger Games today

clockworkstop:

All I’m saying is that this better not be a repeat of roughly three years ago when the internet also told me that Twilight was amazing and I was severely misled. I hope you have not screwed me over again, internet. You already have one strike.

If we had to compare the Hunger Games to a popular internet book series, I think Harry Potter would be a much closer approximation than Twilight. There were times reading the first two books where I would close them and place them across the room, and then pick them up again five minutes later, because I knew what was about to happen and I both wanted to know and didn’t.