...and our needs to confess. We may remember how, in childhood, adults were able at first to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make, for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredeemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves, there can only be our own footprints.
- R.D. Laing
That is the quotation which opens Mary Karr's memoir, The Liar's Club, one of my very favorite books. If you are unfamiliar, I strongly urge you to pick up this work - it is a thing which causes me to write, with a short glance down any page. Her words are so resonant for me that re-reading the first page this afternoon sent such a frisson down my spinal column I wondered if there was some preternatural connection between this woman's life and my own.
What books do something like that for you?
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Book four of Paradise Lost, Bringing Out the Dead, Macbeth, and As I Lay Dying, though there are more.
I'm easy like that, ya know...
Atlas Shruuged, especially the chapter 'The Moratorium on Brains"
Toni Morrison's Sula. Which is all about names, the power of naming.
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