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358 pages, Hardcover
First published April 10, 2014
Aede Wishes for The Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- WB Yeats
We're a race of elsewhere people. That's what makes us the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world's worst bankers. ...It's in the eyes. The idea of a better home. Some of us have it worse than others. My father had it running in the rivers of him.
"We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told. In Faha everyone is a long story. We are our stories. The River Shannon passes below our house on its journey to the sea."
"We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living."
"Perhaps because my father had discovered that, despite the weather, there was some profound affinity between the Deep South, Latin America, and the County Clare, on his shelves in various editions are almost all of what Professor Martin called the dangerously hypnotic novels of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Dickens is the only other whose work is so present."
"I lay in his lap and he read and we sailed off elsewhere. Dad and I went up the Mississippi, to Yoknapatawpha County, through the thick yellow fog that hung over the Thames or in through those dense steamy banana plantations all the way to Macondo. We went in the large lumpy blanket-covered Sugan boat-chair that was placed in by the Stanley range where our cribs were put to keep us warm and where Aeney slept like the Pope Nan said but I cried and was lifted, swaddled in West Clare Tropic, sucked my tiny thumb and was ready for departure."
"There's a book inside you. There's a library inside me."
"The library that grew in our house contained all my father's idiosyncrasies, contained the man he was at thirty-five, and at forty, at forty-five. He did not edit himself. He did not look back at the books of ten years ago and pluck out the ones whose taste was no longer his."I can relate to this as my Father's only daughter (and child), and the importance it's had on my own life. Williams writes of a father/daughter relationship not often seen in literature, though these are generally portrayed much less than father/son relationships in the first place.
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.
(T)here's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavor. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you'll see.
I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.