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f5bf7c3
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One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I'm thinking is maybe it's time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or wathever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn't working.
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Ron Rash |
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d3493d1
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I missed that one,' Henryson said. 'The war, I mean.' 'Don't worry,' Snipes said. 'Another one's always coming down the pike. That's something all your historians and philosophers agree on. A feller over in Germany looks to be ready to set a match to Europe soon enough, and quick as they snuff him out there'll be another to take his place.
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Ron Rash |
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8984d94
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Rachel felt the grief grow so wide and deep it felt like a dark fathomless pool she'd never emerge from. Because there was nothing left to do now, nothing except endure it.
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Ron Rash |
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bb4af57
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But as Rachel watched the sheriff enter the front door, it was hard to believe the farmhouse itself was still there, because a place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world. The earth itself shouldn't be able to abide it.
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Ron Rash |
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d3cf2bd
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Nietzsche once said "that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." I didn't believe that, but to willfully defy the quote was to tempt fate--and if to find it true, to know nothing remained but emptiness."
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Ron Rash |
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8bc4432
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It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. And now this brown-eyed child. Don't love it, Rachel told herself. D..
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Ron Rash |
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c879051
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The world lies all before us.
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Ron Rash |
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6abb395
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A great business investment, religion. I'll take it over government bonds anytime.
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Ron Rash |
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4053ad9
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Something Rich and Strange She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won' t hit her head..
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Ron Rash |
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d8d05e3
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You Men notice so little Pemberton, Physical strength is your genders sole advantage" - Serena"
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Ron Rash |
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448146c
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I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe's house. I'd planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the more reason to do it, so he would not be forgotten, or only, as Wolfe himself wrote, by the wind grieved. The
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Ron Rash |
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9d2a6d7
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petrichord: the sound of water sliding over smooth stone.
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Ron Rash |
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ba3d1da
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The world is ripe, and we'll pluck it like an apple from a tree.
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Ron Rash |
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0bc3eb0
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What does eminent domain mean?" Stewart asked. "It means you're shit out of luck," Ross said."
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Ron Rash |
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8d56b15
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a copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.
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Ron Rash |
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f7d23b1
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Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can't see nothing.
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Ron Rash |
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c604920
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Some of the highlanders considered the true Christmas to be on January fourteenth. Old Christmas, they called it, believing it was the day the magi visited the Christ child.
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Ron Rash |
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678a26e
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all the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren't sure that you could.
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Ron Rash |
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113bc83
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It's ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can't see nothing.
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Ron Rash |
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aa836d8
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What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she'd worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother's voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time pas..
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Ron Rash |
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cd0dde7
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My experience has been that altruism is invariably a means to conceal one's personal failures.
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Ron Rash |
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6239ac4
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wisely reconsidered and let the hand
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Ron Rash |
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b1200cc
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disse Serena.
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Ron Rash |
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55d03d1
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After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded in up to our waists, heat and cold balanced as if by a carpenter's level. That was the best sensation, knowing in a moment, but not quite yet, I'd dive into cold but emerge into warmth. Years later at Wake Forest, when I still believed I might c..
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Ron Rash |
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6eb650b
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Another memory comes, not of the final time I saw Ligeia but a week before she disappeared, something mundane yet vivid. The mystery of memory. There's surely some scientific explanation for why the brain decides Don't let go of this. I've read novels and cannot recall a single character's name and yet I remember a red bicycle glanced once in a hardware-store window, a mole on a stranger's chin, a kitchen match lying beside a hearth. These ..
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Ron Rash |
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73f2159
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Of course, who can forget that first love, or first sex, or first drink - especially if they all occur together. I also remember how, after Ligeia had left our lives, I'd worried for months that she might reappear and tell Bill what I'd never confessed to him. But after a while nostalgia supplanted guilt and our summer at Panther Creek became more a tender coming-of-age story, a summer of love complete with bucolic setting.
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Ron Rash |
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7735c2c
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So people surprise us. They can lie to each other, as my brother had done to me, and as I had lied to him that September evening at Panther Creek, and now it appeared those two lies could only lead to one imponderable truth.
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Ron Rash |
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4ac4446
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The name's Old Testament derivation did not surprise him. Campbell's first name was Exra, and there was an Absalom and a Solomon in the camp. But no Lukes or Matthews, which Buchanan had once noted, telling Pemberton that from his research the highlanders tended to live more by the Old Testament than the New.
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Ron Rash |
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4697927
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He'd watched the old man live his life "by the signs." Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered and the timber cut, even when a hole was best dug. A red sunrise meant coming rain, as did the call of a raincrow. Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, or a life about to end. Boyd was fourteen when he heard the corpse bird in the woods behind the barn. His grandfather had be..
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Ron Rash |
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ceb41fe
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His great-aunt had been born on this land, lived on it eight decades, and knew it as well as she knew her husband and children. That was what she'd always claimed, and could tell you to the week when the first dogwood blossom would brighten the ridge, the first blackberry darken and swell enough to harvest. Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whet..
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Ron Rash |
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cc694b1
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It was the kind of early fall day Rachel had always loved, not warm or cold, the sky all deep-blue and cloudless and no breeze, the crops proud and ripe and the leaves so pretty but hardly a one yet fallen--a day so perfect that the earth itself seemed sorry to let it pass, so slowed down its roll into evening and let it linger.
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Ron Rash |
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bb447a9
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Do this one thing.
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Ron Rash |
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f6a137a
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A brown trout sips one off the surface. Beneath the trout, mica-flecked sand gleams white. Come fall the female's caudal fin will nudge the grains to make a nest, the eggs spilling like pearls into a purse.
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Ron Rash |
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a3ff8fe
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He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning.
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Ron Rash |
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7e7e692
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An image came back to him with such vividness that it might have been framed before him in glass
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Ron Rash |
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95cc646
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I guess sometimes you've got the hope-fors so much it makes you imagine all sorts of things.
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Ron Rash |
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224fd7c
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A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what's under itself, then resettles. A pickup passes from the other direction. The flock lifts again and this time keeps rising, a narrowing swirl as if sucked through a pipe and then an unfurl of rhythm sudden sprung, becoming one entity as it wrinkles, smooths out, drifts down like a snapped bedsheet. Then swerves..
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Ron Rash |
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e448d7b
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He was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges, Thomas Wolfe declares at the end of Look Homeward, Angel, and those words I spoke aloud to the bathroom mirror that summer, and thought of Wolfe in New York, writing between journeys to the West, and of Hemingway traveling from Paris cafes to African veldts. "YOU'RE"
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Ron Rash |
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4981efd
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A Servant of History Her eyes were of the lightest blue as if time had rinsed away most of the colour, but there was a liveliness inside them.
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Ron Rash |
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53d2aca
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My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it.
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Ron Rash |
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9076343
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In a small Southern town during the 1950s, elopement and divorce were serious moral transgressions deserving of punishment.
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Ron Rash |
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1c8d456
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It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.
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Ron Rash |
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b3ab266
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Stewart unfolded the oilcloth that kept his Bible dry and began reading. Ross reached into his pocket and brought out his tobacco pouch. He removed his rolling papers and found them sodden as Snipes' newspaper. Henryson, who also was anticipating a cigarette, found his papers in the same condition. "I was at least hoping my lungs might be warm and dry a minute," Ross complained. "You'd think there'd be one little pleasure you could have, ev..
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Ron Rash |
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bc64a82
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Pemberton felt something shift inside him, something small but definite, the way a knob's slight twist allowed a door to swing wide open.
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knob
shift
slight
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Ron Rash |