Thursday Thoughts...

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.” 

Margaret Atwood

Of all the authors who can take you on a ride through a house being torn apart in a whirlwind or a boat crushed by icebergs, it is Ms Atwood.

 The way she describes it here make its feel as if you are on a roller coaster, with things coming at you from every direction as you grapple to take this bit and make it make sense; then adding it to that bit to see a slightly clearer picture. Breathless I am.

And then in moments of quiet, after you have finished, you can sit back and reflect on it; join all those dots together and see how the whole thing makes sense.  Oftentimes you wonder as you make your way through a book or a story how things fit together and does this go with that? At the end, you sometimes learn that things you thought might be important weren't, that some events were not in fact portents of anything or that subtle mentions were the things that held it all together.

Sometimes you can only make sense of books and stories (and life) backwards...