no blogs this week!*

* except dooce.

But anyway, what with "work" and reading Harry Potter, blogs have mostly fallen by the wayside this week.

I needed a break from lugging HP on the train, and am rereading bits of an old favorite (and very small!!!) book, The Optimist's Daughter.

It's pretty quiet and spare and so well written. I wish I could write like Eudora Welty.

This is my favorite passage. It's a little dramatic, but it's pretty much the loudest thing in this book, and I swear, it works:

She had gone on living with the old perfection undisturbed and undisturbing. Now, by her own hands, the past had been raised up, and he looked at her, Phil himself-- here waiting, all the time, Lazarus. He looked at her out of eyes wild with the craving for his unlived life, with mouth open like a funnel's.

What would have been their end, then? Suppose their marriage had ended like her father and her mother's? Or like her mother's father and mother's? Like -

"Laurel! Laurel! Laurel!" Phil's voice cried.

She wept for what happened to life.

"I wanted it!" Phil cried. His voice rose with the wind in the night and went around the house and around the house. It became a roar. "I wanted it!"