I confess that I went to see the film Cloud Atlas and I liked it. Of course, I liked the book as well, but I thought that the directors had done a fine job of creating a cinematic adventure out of a complicated book. Favorite line: “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
I confess that I’m reading Mary Ruefle’s book of essays Madness, Rack and Honey but I got sidetracked this weekend by Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist which contains really beautiful writing and compelling characters. Today, I’m back to Ruefle. I’ve marked the crap out of this book. Asterisks, underlining, exclamation points, and even a few sticky note flags.
I’m about to quote a chunk of a passage here, so have some patience with me. From the title essay, “Madness, Rack, and Honey”:
…Metaphor is not, and never has been, a mere literary term. It is an event. A poem must rival a physical experience and metaphor is, simply, an exchange of energy between two things. If you believe that metaphor is an event, and not just a literary term denoting comparison, than you must conclude that a certain philosophy arises: the philosophy that everything in the world is connected. I’ll go slowly here: if metaphor is not idle comparison, but an exchange of energy, an event, then it unites the world by its very premise – that things connect and exchange energy. And if you extrapolate this philosophy further, you eventually cease to believe in separate realities.
I confess that I’m not sure that it’s entirely coincidence that I’m stumbling over the idea of connection so often recently….
We’re on a similar reading path. Last week, I read The Orchardist and loved it, and this week I’ve discovered the erasure poems of Mary Ruefle. . . . Can’t wait to hear what’s next on your book list.
I’m loving this booklist; that quotation is gold also. I confess when I read Cloud Atlas three years ago, I went around telling everyone who’d listen that it was the best novel I’d read in ten years. And I couldn’t imagine how they’d make a movie out of it. Glad to hear you thought it was a successful translation.