William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf has on the front cover a photograph of a pair of pugilists on shiny wet ground. A tale of a friendship that ends in a desert. Lymie Peters and Spud Latham, the athlete and the devout, thoughtful observer, each faithful in their own way, they complement each other until one day the egg has broken and they don't. Sally Forbes brings this about.
The desert is the natural dwelling place not only of Arabs and Indians but also of people who can't speak when they want to and of those others who, like Lymie Peters, have nothing more to say, people who have stopped justifying and explaining, stopped trying to account for themselves or their actions, stopped hoping that someone will come along and love them and so make sense out of their lives.
Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It has on the front cover Brad Pitt on a rock casting a cursive loop over a tree-lit river. I have liked the phrase of his title for many years. I didn't know how he came by it, and didn't wonder enough to read the book, until now. I bought a copy from a bookshop in Jena, which arrived yesterday, and I read the title story yesterday and today, up at the pond and in the middle of the night. It's a thickly printed pocket book from 1992. The fly fisherman does not know the river, he becomes the river, and he becomes the river by knowing how the river was made, and knowing that it was made with fishermen in mind.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
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