★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Stegner must be my spirit author. The Big Rock Candy Mountain affected me on a deeply emotional level because of the many similiaries from my own life that that novel explores. This one touched me as well, but for diffrent reasons. The narrator is 69, retired to his dream home in California, and deeply unhappy. He looks back on his life as pointless, a spectator.
The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark.
Most of the story revolves around reading a journal from twenty years before when he and his wife take a sabbatical to Denmark after the death of their 20-something son. He falls in love but passes on the opportunity to disrupt everything and run away with her. Twenty years of regret comes to a boil in the climax of the story.
A heart wrenching story.
Highlights
Thumbing the pages, I saw names I had entirely forgotten, places I didn’t ever recall visiting, references to feelings I would have sworn I never felt. (Page 17)
Take gratefully any pleasures the world provides, but don’t curse God when they fail. Nobody in the universe ever promised you anything. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus. (Page 19)
So as the people we knew back East die, or are institutionalized, or take themselves off to Tucson or Sarasota or Santa Barbara to estivate their last years away as we are doing here, our contacts here shrink, too. (Page 49)
It comes as a shock to realize that I am just killing time till time gets around to killing me. It is not arthritis and the other ailments. Ben exaggerates those. It is just the general comprehension that nothing is building, everything is running down, there are no more chances for improvement. (Page 82)
When we had been married no more than twelve hours, she told me she had made a vow never to go to sleep on a quarrel. It must be settled before we closed our eyes. Since my impulse is to close my eyes on the quarrel and sleep it off, our systems have not always meshed. (Page 83)
in every choice there is a component, maybe a big component, of pain. (Page 199)
The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. (Page 203)