Tuesday, May. 24, 2005
all the king's men, posted at 9:54 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com This is way better than anything I can provide here, and much better than the entry that I just wrote and posted:What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind which become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.
- All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
I was very, very moved by this passage. The book is long and dense and I worry that I'll never finish, but I finally like the narrator, and finally feel like the things that he says are insightful.