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December 28, 2009
Terrible Beauty
Over the holiday I read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.
With last but one page, I put the book aside and burst into tears. ( Last time that happened it must have been Dickens, many years ago). Only later I finished the remaining paragraph.
Without giving too much away (for the movie is coming to your local multiplex cinema shortly), it's a shattering, bleak, spare, terrible, beautiful, poetic, shocking account of the postapocalyptic world coming to an end. And it's full of wonders. Like all best art it makes you feel more connected to life (the opposite of 'escapism') than you might have felt before.
Take this:
"No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.."
Happy Christmas!
Posted by Marzena at December 28, 2009 07:41 PM