Friday, October 10, 2008

a severe mercy.

So I'm reading this book A Severe Mercy and really enjoying it.  
I feel like my love for understanding the connectedness of the world keeps being fed and fed.
Grahm and I are very similar to these characters... in our interests.
However, I do feel that we don't take care of our affection for each other as they do; not to such extremes anyway.
Should I feel like that is a weakness... that maybe we don't have a love that is as amazing as theirs?  I don't have a lot of desire to go to that extreme.
This makes me feel guilty and sad.

I do like this book though... it has several compelling elements. 
The writing is well done, coupled with the relational aspect; God and Davy and the role they play in this man's life.
(p.s. i love that her name is Davy)

.. and they had talked, there in the hospital, of dogs and trees and poems and adventures,

 and of how it had all been.


pg. 21


He remembered suddenly another summer night in this place, a night like this one. He and davy, alone in the house, had put Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream on the record player at high volume, and with all the casements of the study flung wide, they had gone out onto the lawn at the edge of the wood. Everything was blanched white in the moonlight except for deep pools of shadow, and there was the scent of roses in the air. they had held each other's hands and danced and chased each other, smiling in the moonlight, and at last flung themselves down laughing beneath the great beech while the music sang around them.





pg. 25



She told me about a coasting voyage she had taken all by herself, just because she wanted to be on a ship and the sea. No girl who liked ships and the sea could be all bad. There had been a storm, and the passengers had run or been shoo'd below; but Davy had crept forward into the bows and crouched in a coil of line, wet and loving the spray and the plunging bow. This story appealed to me beyond words, Then we discovered that we both loved poetry; she capped one of my quotations. We grinned at each other, we were linked by metre. She wasn't exactly a country woman, but she liked dogs; her family had a stone cottage, built by her father, at a lake in western New Jersey. Davy liked to paddle in a canoe along the wooded shores at night, listening to the owls. A girl who liked the sea and owls and dogs and poetry: Good heavens! a girl of girls! Then-then she said something about how beauty hurts. 'What! You, too?' I exclaimed, in effect. ' You know that? The pain of beauty? I thought I was the only one.' Whether love was born that night, I cannot certainly say: friendship was.
For once, at least, I listened more than I talked. And yet we both knew that everything= the sea and the owls, poems and beauty and a sort of humour that was more a grin than a laugh- was making links between us. There was a growing excitement of discovery. I expect I talked about flying a bit, for I was very keen. And she was eager to fly. She was, indeed, an eager spirit. If any single word captures her essence- the mot just for her, always- it is that: eager. Gay and sweet and eager. Straight, too. And valiant. That night, when very late we drove back to the city the others sleeping in the back and she and I still eagerly talking, we had found a real closeness. Earlier I had said I would never kiss a girl unless it would really mean something. this was a bit of a challenge to Davy. Anyhow, it would have meant something.
So the next time I did. But not, as she might have expected, in a scene of soft lights and music. Rather, when she proved that she was not one of those screechy girls I detested. The streets were icy. Perhaps I was driving a bit too fast. A major intersection as the lights changed against us- and a sheet of ice. We slid helplessly into the traffic. Buses thundered down upon us. Cars all but reared up on their hind wheels o avoid us. I snapped a glance at Davy. She caught it and grinned. I grinned happily back. We came gently against the diagonally opposite kerb. A policemen with an old fashioned look on his face strode towards us. I leaned quickly over and kissed her. Later, the ice being broken as it were, I kissed her lots more.

-A Severe Mercy