#amazement

Harold Brodkey described his last days and his impending death from AIDS in a slim but powerful book: "This Wild Darkness". At the end he concluded:

“One may be tired of the world–tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality–while reality itself remains very dear. One wants a glimpse of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely real, without miracle–or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of the river. It is precarious. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There never was any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.”

As the kids say: peace out.