In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…yes, there’s a theme...
I am reading:
Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2) by Thomas Merton- I would like to move quicker through 1948 but...Merton notes a lot. Plus, The Seven Storey Mountain is published that year, although he’s not as involved with that, it seems.
There is only one way to peace: be reconciled that of yourself you are what you are, and it might not be especially magnificent, what you are.God has his own plan for making something else of you, and it is a plan which you are mostly too dumb to understand.
Belief in god not really required to understand that.
Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach- Saw this in one of those “take a book, leave a book” libraries and took this one I’m really into the subject in my life, generally, but for some reason I got caught up with a Marlene Dietrich story.
Alone, I discovered myself looking hard at things, as if I were seeing them for the first time, or seeing them properly for the first time. I wondered if solitude promoted this activity, or whether it was the result of having more time for everything, more time to look and see, more to concentrate on what I was seeing.
But on page 101 there are three long paragraphs, occupying the whole page, of direct quotation from Dietrich in conversation with her husband, overheard and then reported by her daughter who, at the time, was six years old…
What was I to think? What could I believe? That the child Maria retained and then produced, without question or paraphrase, these hundred or so sentences? That, in addition, she could recall the exact food her mother ate on that day more than fifty years ago?…
From this point on, unless I was given a letter or a diary entry, I questioned everything I read...
I don’t know why I’m fascinated with the Dietrich stuff...well, I do know why.
[The diary is about to post but...Maria Riva is still living?!]
Autospy by Patricia Cornwell
2666 by Roberto Bolano
