When everything you read starts to sound the same...

...listen!

I read a quote in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our FamiliesWWTIYTTWWBKWOF, or perhaps just We Wish to Inform You) which turned out to be from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Made me want to read more, so I did, a bit:

" (hereby abbreviated Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: in the force of imagination that pierces or exhalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from the bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the thick of the battle of Armageddon without being aware of anything more than the annoyance of a little explosive smoke and struggling on the ground immediately about us."

Made me think of a standout passage (for me, anyway) in Augie March, which put words to a sense that I had but couldn't express verbally, as the above passage did again for me today:

"Unless you want to say that we're at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share in grandeur is like a boy's share in fairytale kings, being of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we're comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods, which is just what would please Caesar among us teeming democrats, and if we don't have any special wish to abdicate into some different, lower form of existence out of shame for our defects before the golden faces of these and other old-time men, then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names. But I don't want to be pushed into exaggeration by such opinion, which is the opinion of students who, at all ages, feel their boyishness when they confront the past."

Which reminds me of another takes-the-words-out-of-my-mouth passage that I read recently (and at this point I am fully realizing that this post is for myself alone and is dead boring to anyone else reading this far), this time from Paul Theroux's introduction to Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps (the book itself didn't do anything for me, but the introduction was surprisingly epic):

"Drinking and watching her, 'I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know. The unconscious mind is often sentimental; I have writen 'a shape,' and the shape, of course, is roughly that of a human heart.' This thought is unlikely to occur to the long-term expatriate in an African country, who would never think of a map of the whole continent. Such a person, unsentimental for reasons of survival, would think of Africa as the small town or clearing he is working in. Any maps he thinks of would be maps of his district, or at the very most, his province."

Being able to understand my present location, in geography and history, with any kind of realistic perspective has always seemed to me to be a great challenge, and I guess I've always seen it, and still see it, as an ultimate goal to be reached, maybe even the purpose of life. I don't believe that realism precludes optimism, and that's why I admire Augie so much, because he's able to see the world with such an even, realistic perspective, but he somehow finds hope and pleasure in every moment. He sees life as it is, and he loves it. Can we ask for anything more?

The more I read and the more I see, the smaller the holes in the fabric become. Read and see, read and see.