When We the Living was completed, she knew she now could write her “serious” novel, a novel that would present her philosophy and would be written fully in the literary style that had been struggling slowly and painfully into life. She had learned enough about her new country confidently to place the novel’s action in America. She was, at the age of thirty, fully an adult, prepared to handle adult characters.
She knew what the theme of her new novel was to be; while still writing We the Living, she had worked on it in what she called “small glances”—that is, it was not a systematic activity, but something her mind went to whenever she was momentarily free of other responsibilities.
Sayfa 132
For instance, I know that when
most fish get old, they complain about everything. I want to know if life is simply for circling around in a small place until you become old and nothing else, or is there another way to live in
the world?
Pdf-dən oxuyuramKitabı okudu
2. A Small Miracle
Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye...If we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition.
Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.
I just want everything to be like it was, Eileen said. And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different. Alice was smiling sadly. But if things are different, can we still be friends? she asked. Eileen put her arm around Alice's shoulders. If you weren't my friend I wouldn't know who I was, she said. Alice rested her face in Eileen's arm, closing her eyes. No, she agreed. I wouldn't know who I was either. And actually for a while I didn't. Eileen looked down at Alice's small blonde head, nestled on the sleeve of her dressing gown. Neither did I, she said. Half past two in the morning. Outside, astronomical twilight. Crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand. Another place, another time.
Sayfa 325Kitabı okudu
It was a place where boys and girls could acquire the skills required to settle the arid land: how to herd sheep and milk the goats and the cows; how to press seeds into the hard, salty soil in a way that would give them nourishment; the proper way to sharpen and swing a scythe. It was also a place where boys and girls were trained to be soldiers, knowing that Zionism would surely require a fight.
Sayfa 13
