A Squall!

　　"Caleb! Anna!"

　　We ran outside and saw a huge cloud, horribly black, moving toward us pver the north fields. Papa slid down the roof, helping Sarh after him.

　　"A squall!" he yelled to us. He help up his arms and Sarah jumped off the porch roof.

　　"Get the horses inside," he ordered Caleb. "Get the sheep, Anna. And the cows. The barn is safest."

　　The grasses flattened. There was a hiss of wind, a sudden pungent smell. Our faces looked yellow in the strange light. Caleb and I jumped over the fence and found the animals huddled by the barn. I counted the sheep to make sure they were all there, and herded them into a large stall. A few raindrops came, gentle at first, then stronger and louder, so that Caleb and I covered our ears and stared at each other without speaking. Caleb looked frightened and I tried to smile at him. Sarah carried a sack into the barn, her hair wet and streaming down her neck, Papa came behind, Lottie and Nick with him, their ears flat against their heads.

　　"Wait!" cried Sarah. "My chickens!"

　　"No, Sarah!" Papa called after her. But Sarah had already run from the barn into a sheet of rain. My father followed her. The sheep nosed open their stall door and milled around the barn, bleating. Nick crept under my arm, and a lamb, Mattie with the black face, stood close to me, trembling. There was a soft paw on my lap, then a gray body. Seal. And then, as the thunder pounded and the wind rose and there was the terrible crackling of lightning close by, Sarah and Papa stood in the barn doorway, wet to the skin. Papa carried Sarah's chickens. Sarah came with an armful of summer roses.

　　Sarah's chickens were not afraid, and they settled like small red bundles in the hay. Papa closed the door at last, shutting some of the sounds of the storm. The barn was eerie and half lighted, like dusk without a lantern. Papa spread blankets around our shoulders and Sarah unpacked a bag of cheese and bread and jam. At the very bottom of the bag were Sarah's shells.

Sarah, Plain and Tall, P53-55
Patricia MacLachlan
ISBN 978-0-06-440205-7

read more»

Dune

　　After dinner, Sarah drew pictures to send home to Maine. She began a charcoal drawing of fields, rolling like the sea rolled. She drew a sheep whose ears were too big. And she drew a windmill.

　　"Windmill was my first word," said Caleb. "Papa told me so."

　　"Mine was flower," I said. "What was yours, Sarah?"

　　"Dune," said Sarah.

　　"Dune?" Caleb looked up.

　　"In Maine," said Sarah, "there are rock cliffs that rise up at the edge of the sea. And there are hills covered with pine and spruce trees, green with needles. But William and I found a sand dune all our own. It was soft and sparkling with bits of mica, and when we were little woe would slide down the dune into the water."

Sarah, Plain and Tall, P33-34
Patricia MacLachlan
ISBN 978-0-06-440205-7

read more»

She Sat on the Porch Alone

　　The sheep made Sarah smile. She sank her fingers into their thick, coarse wool. She talked to them, running with the lambs, letting them sucks on her fingers. She named them after her favorite aunts, Harriet and Mattie and Lou. She lay down in the field beside them and sang "Sumer Is Icumen in," her voice drifting over meadow grasses, carried by the wind.

　　She cried when we found a lamb that had died, and she shouted and shook her fist at the turkey buzzards that came from nowhere to eat it. She would not let Caleb or me come near. And that night, Papa went with a shovel to bury the sheep and a lantern to bring Sarah back. She sat on the porch alone. Nick crept up to lean against her knees.

Sarah, Plain and Tall, P32-34
Patricia MacLachlan
ISBN 978-0-06-440205-7

read more»

When Will We Sing?

　　Seal stretched and made a small cat sound. I watched her circle the dogs and sniff the air. Caleb came out and stood beside me.

　　"When will we sing?" he whispered.

　　I shook my head, turning the white stone over and over in my hand. I wished everything was as perfect as the stone. I wished that Papa and Caleb and I were perfect for Sarah. I wished we had a sea of our own.

Sarah, Plain and Tall, P24
Patricia MacLachlan
ISBN 978-0-06-440205-7

read more»

Bring the Sea

　　Caleb slipped his hand into mine as we stood on the porch, watching the road. He was afraid.

　　"Will she be nice?" he asked. "Like Maggie?"

　　"Sarah will be nice," I told him.

　　"How far away is Maine?" he asked.

　　"You know how far. Far away, by the sea."

　　"Will Sarah bring some sea?" he asked.

　　"No, you cannot bring the sea."

　　The sheep ran in the field, and far off the cows moved slowly to the pond, like turtles.

　　"Will she like us?" asked Caleb very softly.

　　I watched the marsh hawk wheel down behind the barn.

　　He looked up at me.

　　"Of course she will like us." He answered his own question. "We are nice," he added, making me smile.

Sarah, Plain and Tall, P20
Patricia MacLachlan
ISBN 978-0-06-440205-7

read more»

But They Couldn't

　　I wiped my hands on my apron and went to the window. Outside, the prairie reached out and touched the places where the sky came down. Though winter was nearly over, there were patches of snow and ice everywhere. I looked at the long dirt road that crawled acros the plains, remembering the morning that Mama had died, cruel and sunny. They had come for her in a wagon and taken her away to be buried. And then the cousins and aunts and uncles had come and tried to fill up the house. But they couldn't.

　　Slowly, one by one, they left. And then the days seemed long and dark like winter days, even though it wasn't winter. And Papa didn't sing.

Sarah, Plain and Tall, P5-6
Patricia MacLachlan
ISBN 978-0-06-440205-7

read more»

Beauty - be not Caused, It is

　　This was, I realised, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.

　　"Beauty - be not caused," said Emily Dickinson. "It is."

　　In one way she was wrong The scattering of light over a long distances creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides, which are themselves the result of gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes.

　　The mystery lies in how those things become beautiful.

　　And they wouldn't have been beautiful once, at least not to my eyes. To experience beauty on Earth, you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. This shy so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived.

The Humans, P283
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

read more»

The Nature of Reality

The Nature of Reality

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge
number of illusions in which we all collaborate
willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while
that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked
when reality is torn down around us.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　- J. G. Ballard

　　What was reality?

　　An objective truth? A collective illusion? A major opinion? The product of historical understanding? A dream? A dream. Well, yes, maybe. But if this had been a dream, then it was one from which I hadn't yet woken.

　　But once humans really study things in depth - whether in the artificially divided fields of quantum physics or biology or neuroscience or mathematics or love - they come closer and closer to nonsense, irrationality, and anarchy. Everything they know is disproved, over and over again. The Earth is not flat; leeches have no medicinal value; there is no God; progress is a myth; the present is all they have.

　　And this doesn't just happen on the big scale. It happens to each individual too.

　　In every human life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says, what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference being how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn't there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrink their mouths and ambitions. The weight of denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is act of change.

　　I was something. And now I am something else.

　　I was a monster and now I am a different type of monster. One that will die and feel pain, but one that also will live, and maybe even find happiness one day. Because happiness is possible for me now. It exists on the other side of the hurt.

The Humans, P259-260
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3

read more»