On my mind...

Some of the most honest writing I've experienced about cancer...

"Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself - a tumor with its differentiated muscle and tone cells, a clump of wild nothing, and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster's architecture, a demon's sabotage and chaos.  Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim incognito in the blood.  George Lucas - direct that!...

... Pulling through is what people do around here.  There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn't bravery at all.  It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess and an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow?  'Everyone admires us for our courage,' says one man, 'they have no idea what they're talking about.'"

- Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here"

Wish I Wrote That

A co-worker lent me The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif a few years ago.  I lost it down the back of a bookshelf and just found it the other weekend.  It was a pretty interesting read - I'm always a sucker for books that use different and varied narrative styles to tell a story.  I appreciated how Soueif wove in the historical realities of 20th century Egypt under the thumb of English rule.  Some parts were a little too love-y for me, but on the whole it was an enjoyable read.

"How can it strike so suddenly?  Without warning, without preparation?  Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think 'I love', you know - or at least you imagine you know - what it is you love?  How can it be that a set of the shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?"

Wish I Wrote That...

The curious came from far away.  A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel, but rather, those of a...bat.  The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"