So here's the room now that it's done. I was driving home from the library and I was reading the first paragraph of a book I got, and it goes like this:
"In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day."
As I swerved to miss two large grey geese crossing the street I couldn't help but gape at these two sentences. I think the idea that I'm soon going to have a child is coloring my thoughts, but I just think this passage is pretty super. The book is Peter Camenzind, and like all of Hesse's books (except Journey to the East- I found that one tiresome... maybe it was a bad translation) I was... am... hooked. I don't know what it is, but everything in this book is magical. There's a whole passage about clouds that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. Maybe I'm getting soft. The book is set in the Alps, and I once dreamed of a woman giving birth in one of those telpherage cars high above a mountain range. Maybe it was the Bermese mountains. I think I envy anyone who grew up in a time and place free of television, roads, cars, phones, computers, fast food, cell phones. The World is Flat, indeed. I think we've flattened it irrevocably... the way I almost flattened those geese.