Food

I am very glad that I picked up "The Stones Diaries" in a charity shop a month ago. Over the course of the past few days, I consumed it like good food. It really held me and I admired several things about the writer - Carol Shields.

I appreciated her humanity,  wisdom and keen understanding of the human condition. Furthermore, I enjoyed the novel's quirky, clever and varied construction. In addition, I admired her use of language. Words being used to make telling points like daggers or smoothing like a gentle balm. And there was plenty of humour too. How can I say it - this book was very much "alive". Filled with joy and sorrow and misunderstanding and eccentricity and kindness and stupidity and hope.

Of course, I could go on explaining the plot, describing the central character - Daisy Goodwill and the eighty years of life she experienced before dying - as so many aged and financially stable North Americans do - in Florida. Instead, I am just going to leave you with a flavour of the book through these four quotations...

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“When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that our forbears were imbued with a deeper purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind, believing, for example, that early scientists pursued their ends with unbroken „dedication“ and that artists worked in the flame of some perpetual „inspiration“. But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today. The least breeze, whether it be sexual or psychological – or even a real breeze, carrying with it the refreshment of oxygen and energy – has the power to turn us from our path.”

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“My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she’s over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off.”

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“He was discomfited to see how easily men (and women as well) stepped from the train to station platform, from platform to train – with ease, with levity, laughing and talking and greeting each other as though oblivious to the abrupt geographical shifts they were making, and disrespectful of the distance and differences they entered. Many were hatless, their clothes brightly coloured. The cases they carried appeared, from the way they handled them, to be feather-light.”

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“Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction.”

Carol Shields (1935 - 2003)