I guess in some ways Blogs are the new scrapbooks – if you look at how E uses his with his photos and collection of hyperlinks. I’m trying to get my house in order today (read: me) and so I’m tuning out the outside world and tuning in. I was taping some stuff into my scrap book that I have half ass kept up with for 15 years. I stumbled across an interview with Jane Smiley from many years ago about a novella she had written – The Age of Grief – while Smiley is known for her Thousand Acres – it is this gem of a story that is her masterpiece.
In The Age of Grief, David says: I’m thirty-five years old and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later [ahem, except Rachel, who got there at 46]. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It’s not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only by this time a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It’s more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down after all–after all the schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be they will, let this cup pass from me. But when you’re thirty-three or thirty-five [or 47], the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it’s the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. . . . I understand that later, you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.