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I don't know what it is, but something about this book makes it stick in my mind. I'll be thinking about it a long while.
'As we walked through the rainbow haze of the neon-colored snow he pressed a small book into my hand.
– I received this for an oral favor I happen to have performed for a restaurateur friend. It’s a prayer book. Your need is greater than mine.
– You filthy liar! I cried when we had reached the streetlamp and read the cover. It’s an English-Greek phrase book, badly printed in Salonica!
– Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. Study the book.
– And the English is execrable. F., you torture me purposefully.
– Ah, he said blithely sniffing the night, ah, it’s soon Christmas in India. Families gathered round the Christmas curry, carols before the blazing Yule corpse, children waiting for the bells of Bhagavad-Santa.
– You soil everything, don’t you?
– Study the book. Comb it for prayers and guidance. It will teach you how to breathe.
– Sniff. Sniff.
– No, that’s wrong.'
"Spring comes into Québec from the west. It is the warm Japan Current that brings the change of season to the west coast of Canada, and then the West Wind picks it up. It comes across the prairies in the breath of the Chinook, waking up the grain and caves of bears. It flows over Ontario like a dream of legislation, and it sneaks into Québec, into our villages, between our birch trees. In Montréal the cafés, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montréal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, 'The winter has not killed us again!'"
'As we walked through the rainbow haze of the neon-colored snow he pressed a small book into my hand.
– I received this for an oral favor I happen to have performed for a restaurateur friend. It’s a prayer book. Your need is greater than mine.
– You filthy liar! I cried when we had reached the streetlamp and read the cover. It’s an English-Greek phrase book, badly printed in Salonica!
– Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. Study the book.
– And the English is execrable. F., you torture me purposefully.
– Ah, he said blithely sniffing the night, ah, it’s soon Christmas in India. Families gathered round the Christmas curry, carols before the blazing Yule corpse, children waiting for the bells of Bhagavad-Santa.
– You soil everything, don’t you?
– Study the book. Comb it for prayers and guidance. It will teach you how to breathe.
– Sniff. Sniff.
– No, that’s wrong.'
"Spring comes into Québec from the west. It is the warm Japan Current that brings the change of season to the west coast of Canada, and then the West Wind picks it up. It comes across the prairies in the breath of the Chinook, waking up the grain and caves of bears. It flows over Ontario like a dream of legislation, and it sneaks into Québec, into our villages, between our birch trees. In Montréal the cafés, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montréal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, 'The winter has not killed us again!'"