Just one more thing...

My blog posts tend to be mini-articles, not the quick reads they are intended to be. Maybe I could skip the background info, eh. Um, what was the just one more thing I wanted to say on the subject of Toward You and When The Thrill Is Gone? Oh, I remember..

Was the thing in Readers Digest "Thoughts To Ponder"? Walter Mosley throws a lot of them into his novels. On page three of When The Thrill Is Gone he writes: "Rising to my feet was an act of faith. I had the feeling of being the last man left standing after a lifelong battle in a meaningless war." May not be a thought to ponder, but instantly related to that feeling his character was having. In a vague way it reminds me of rising after fitfully sleeping on cold concrete many mornings, especially so in 2006.

It is the kind of quote I would copy, adding to my collection of quotes. A pondering thought was ~ is gone. Either the scrape of paper used to bookmark the page fell out or the scrape of paper where I distinctly remember scribbling it down disappeared. Um...

It was the same concept found in a Toward You passage: "...you may be at the top of your personal carriage wheel, as far from the mud and stones and filth of the roadbed as it's possible to get, in just a little while that wheel will turn again...", " and you will be back at the bottom." ~ the wheel turns and you end up right back where you started. Metaphor of my life, though I described it as climbing a mountain, just about to reach the summit, slipped back down to the bottom to begin the climb anew.

Each time the climb back up became a bit harder, due to aging, lack of vigor or incentive.

Both novels used analogies to describe fate. Mosley's it was feeling as if the character was a bullet shot from a gun to destination in the distance. In Krusoe's it was being the arrow shot from a bow, speeding to life's fore-drawn conclusion. Shades of Kahlil Gibran.