Sunday, January 03, 2010

mysteries

i wish i knew how to write a mystery. there are some who can do this. and do it well.

the clever ones can weave a path.

others able to play catch-up and be ahead in the end.

some just enjoy reading and want the surprise to be a surprise.

a few fear the end.

the great majority don't care that they exist.


i've forgotten why i'm writing about mysteries.

the book in my hands is on architecture.

architecture of the soul.


$

"Howard Roark laughed."

$

“I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean that he won’t die some day. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict–and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unrevered or unbetrayed; as if there had never been any entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard–one can imagine him existing forever.”

$

“Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.”

$