The last two books I read were each "classics" of their authors. Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" is a semi-autobiographical novel about a 12 year old boy in summer. Cormac McCarthy wrote "Blood Meridian" as a violent exploration of borderland outlaws in the late 1800s in the Southwest. Both authors express themselves incredibly poetically, with fanciful language and high metaphor use. The difference is, McCarthy's novel was a struggle. I breezed through "Dandelion Wine." I worked through "Blood Meridian."
And to me, that makes "Dandelion Wine" a much better book. It's filled with deaths, yes, but it's also filled with hope. It expresses a deep sadness that reflects reality, and only serves to make you glad at the end of it. "Dandelion Wine"'s tears are the kind that Butters cries in the one episode of South Park where his Raisins "girlfriend"ends it with him. Even when you lose something important to you, the knowledge exists that you had it in the first place. Tragedy comes from living. Without it, the tears don't come but neither does the smile.
"Blood Meridian" makes a point with its drudgery and repetition. War and violence keep on keepin' on, and the hearts of men lead to evil if they give in. The poetry was beautiful, the vocabulary perplexingly yet intriguingly arcane, but it never could hook me in. Plot? Not really. Just a lot of walking and riding and killing, and an author making it all seem mundane. I guess it's more depressing than shocking. It is true looking around the internet that it could never be a movie. It lives on its own as a book.
Both books, by the way, are linked to Moby Dick. Which is weird. I guess this is an example of how your brain always finds the connections when it's primed or already looking for them. It's like noticing how your iPod always seems to play the same artist in an hour even when you're on shuffle. Actually it's random, but your brain goes in for false pattern recognition.
Read "Dandelion Wine." Many times. Study "Blood Meridian" in a college course.
This quote from Dandelion Wine links in to both of them, but is really a good life lesson about throwing in the towel when it's the proper time:
"Tom, when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it's best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backwards up the aisle."
And then there's a quote I thought I had written down but I can't find so I'll try and recite from memory:
"She wasn't thin in the way that girls are when they're not loved at seventeen, or fat in the way that women are when they're not loved at fifty, but a firmness, a roundness, when women are at any age and there is no question."
Something like that. The proper Venus.
