There's my father. My father is that man. I used to know him. [Reading Richard Ford's new book, Canada.] or [You gotta love Richard Ford, part II]

Excerpts from Ford, Richard.  Canada, New York: Harper Collins, 2012.

   "...and since so much was about to change because of him, I've thought possibly that a long-suppressed potential in him had suddenly worked itself into visibility on his face.  He was becoming who and what he was always supposed to be.  He'd simply had to wear down through the other layers to who he really was.  I've seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men--homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement in front of bars or in public parks or bus depots, or lined up outside the doors of missions, waiting to get in out of a long winter.  In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.  It's a theory of destiny and character I don't like or want to believe in.  But it's there in me like a hard understory.  I don't, in fact, ever see such a ruined man without saying silently to myself: There's my father.  My father is that man.  I used to know him." [pp 75-76]

 

A view of Great Falls, MT

 

 

"I'm willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think.  Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today.  And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly--first fast, then hardly passing at all.  Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself.  What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed--caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present.
"Who wouldn't want to stop that--if he could?  Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn't admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present?  I would.  Only a saint wouldn't."
[p.120]



 



A view of Great Falls, MT