A Winter's Tale

For those who know me it is no secret that I love libraries. In particular I love my library in Brunswick and thanks to it's awesomeness have enjoyed countless books, plays, and movies over the last year. Just walking into the doors of a library fills me with a rush of excitement - it's like I have a whole bookstore of my own and everything is free!! (yes I know total nerd)

There is however one thing that I dislike; which is that I cannot write or draw in the books themselves. I have gotten into the habit of underlining any words, lines and/or paragraphs that strike me for whatever reason in any book I read and if a book is one I own this is obviously not an issue. The fact that I can't do this with library books is irritating beyond belief, kind of like a mosquito bite that you know you're not supposed to scratch but doing so is the only that provides any relief - I feel like I have to do something to show the world that those words have moved me. Of course certain books are worse than others and the one I'm reading now is one such story. 

At the recommendation of a friend I am reading "A Winter's Tale" by Mark Helperin. It is one of the most beautifully written novels that I have read in a long while and shines on some of the things I love most - winter, the stars, and the magic of early morning. It has taken supreme willpower to not take a pen to those pages and I have actually wondered just how much the library would charge me if I just told them I lost the book and would have to pay for the whole thing. It also in not a short novel and I will almost definitely not finish it before I leave for Utah; which sadly means a two week gap before I will be able to finish. There isn't really anything I can do about that last part, but in order to give my crazy self some peace of mind I am going to share just a few of the passages that spoke to my heart and captured my imagination....


“But despite the cold and perhaps because of it, the sights she saw were what other people would have called dreams, desires, miracles”

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“The abandoned stars were hers for the many rich hours of sparkling winter nights, and, unattended, she took them in like lovers”

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"They got up steam and proceeded calmly to the north – where there seemed to be no people, but only mountains, lakes, reedy snow-filled steppes, and winter gods who played with storms and stars”

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 “There are animals in the stars,” she declared, “like the animal that you describe, with a pelt of light, and deep endless eyes. Astronomers think that the constellations were imagined. They were not imagined at all. There are animals, far distant, that move and thrash smoothly, and yet are entirely still. They aren’t made up of the few stars in the constellations that represent them-they’re too vast-but these point in the directions in which they lie…The eyes of these creatures are wider than a thousand of the universes that we think we know. And the celestial animals move about…all in infinite time, and the crackling of their coats is what makes the static and hissing which bathes an infinity of worlds”

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“She had indeed discovered grace, or madness, in her visions of the starlight”

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“Remember, what we are trying to do in this life is to shatter time and bring back the dead. Rise, rise and see the whole world”

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“He was glad it was winter, when love and ambition flare in the cold”

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“It was something that he could understand only with the gifts that come of early morning – one of those things, like a dream, that one cannot always piece together again to remember and feel in sunlight and day. And yet enough early risings and enough work of heart and memory will bring it, half alive, from unfamiliar depths”

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And because I just can't resist, I end with a picture of one of my favorite reading companions  :)