"I met my class, although I could pretend to no teaching. It was not like a wake; it was one. We shared the shortfalls of our thoughts. 'It's like a dream,' my students said. And more frightening, 'Like waking from a dream.' The America they woke to on Tuesday morning was, like the skyline of New York, changed forever. The always-thereness of here was gone.
The final lesson of my writing class came too soon. There are no words. But there are only words. To say what the inconceivable resembles is all that we have by way of learning how it might be outlived. No comparison can say what happened to us. But we can start with the ruins of our similes, and let 'like' move us towards something larger, some understanding of what 'is.'"
(Richard Powers, The Simile, NYT Magazine, 9/23/01)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment