February 9, 2011
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Alfred Eisenstaedt – The Parisians
My bedroom is an ever-growing fortress of books. I can’t help it. I find security in them, somehow—in the weight of them, in the feeling of their pages between my fingers, in the way they stack atop one another so neatly, like bricks or building blocks or things meant to be together, things meant to become something bigger. I am comforted by all that they contain—by the existence of ideas given like gifts. Books are brave. My desk is piled with them, and my floor is piled with them, my bookshelf is full and I am always hungry.
Every so often, I come across a writer whose words bring me to my knees. Karen Connelly’s One Room in a Castle is a series of short essays, written as if they were letters. They are remarkable in the way that they capture the fullness of the smallest moments. Her prose has a precision and a weight and a momentum that often makes my throat catch.
I don’t know what it is. Writing does this to me. A just-right string of words and I’m struck dumb, clutching my heart.
“Sometimes I feel as if I weigh a thousand tonnes with my words and my nightmares and my camera eyes and my memory. How can our minds weigh so much when our skulls are so small? My skin barely contains my life.”
-Karen Connelly, One Room in a Castle
I don’t have more to say than that. It’s worth reading, if you want to read it.
I just wanted to document its existence in my world.
h.
