Tara’s Reviews > The Road > Status Update

“He tried to remember the dream, but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it. He thought perhaps they’d come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. Even now some part of him wished they’d never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over.”

“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.”

“What had he seen? A drainpipe. A trellis. The dark serpentine of a dead vine running down it like the track of some enterprise upon a graph.”

Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would’ve thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom, shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.”
2/2

“He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat.
1/2

“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.”