(no subject)

[decemberthirty]

The cabin at Stony Lake has a wide, screened front porch that looks out over the sloping lawn and down the length of the lake. One week ago today I was on that porch, getting ready to go to sleep on the daybed there. Behind my right shoulder were the two big glass windows that looked into the main cabin where my sisters, cousins, mother, and aunt were already asleep. Outside the porch on three sides there was nothing but rain; it had been falling, not hard but steadily, for hours. I was reading in bed with a flashlight, staying awake to finish The Farthest Shore.

All night my sleep was light and fragmentary. I hovered around the border between sleep and waking, where it's difficult to tell the difference between dreams and thoughts, and my dream-thoughts were haunted by the steady sound of the rain and by images of Ged and Arren and their descent into the dry land: the silence, the dust, the two figures walking through the dim grey that washes that entire landscape in my imagination. It was a strange night, and I woke up and watched as the day became light. The light seemed to grow out of the lake, a very soft, watery light that grew slowly until it suffused the sky, the landscape, and my porch.

When Arren stands on the shore of Selidor, he looks around him at the dunes, the sea, the living grasses, and Ged; and he says, "I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"

Comments

[decemberthirty.livejournal.com]

Bah. This reads as pretentious, artsy, self-aware, "writerly" claptrap. Oh well.