I like the quiet form, the various aspect-to-aspect transitions in Craig’s drive back to the restaurant after visiting Raina. As sappy, terrible, and journal-like as it may sound, I feel connected to that journey after returning from my Michigan trip last weekend, although that had nothing to do with significant others or any single person really. It’s so much more bleak and monotonous traveling back south, too. The snow recedes from the fields successively until, finally, the roads are bordered only by mud and soggy, flattened prairie grass (pages 504-506 capture this feeling so well, in the change of seasons rather than in the journey south, but still). It actually feels very much like falling off the edge of the earth, as Thompson depicts it. The closer I got to home the more the magic the weekend held dissipated, the more the real world crept back up behind me. At least I got to keep the people closer, though, so there’s that. Craig was missing out on that one.
Anyway, just as Craig and Raina realize the impossibility of running away together, of living indefinitely in their impossible dream, I suppose I had to at some point acknowledge the fact that I could not spend the rest of my days lounging atop a frozen wave one hundred yards out into Lake Michigan. The ephemeral nature of the whole ordeal, the surreal feeling of climbing ten foot mounds of ice. I could cling to the idea of them the way Craig clings to Raina for awhile, but that would only prolong my general disconnect from the rest of the world. It’s actually kind of exciting, though, to move on and feel so changed.
No comments:
Post a Comment