This morning I just finished reading Carol Shield’s Unless and have to briefly share my favourite part before heading off to breakfast… before friggin’ going in to school on a bloody Saturday (which also happens to be the first day of our Hari-Raya Holiday!) to finish report cards : (
“Unless is the worry word of the English language. It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence. Unless – that’s the little subjunctive mineral you carry along in your pocket crease. It’s always there, or else not there. (If you add a capital s to unless, you get Sunless, or Sans Soleil, a very odd Chris Marker film.)
Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re clear about your sexual direction, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in darkness, down to despair. Unless provides you with a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light, the reverse side of not enough. Unless keeps you from drowning in the presiding arrangements… Unless is a miracle of language and perception… It makes us anxious, makes us cunning. Cunning like the wolves that crop up in the most thrilling fairy tales. But it gives us hope.”
Not sure I can articulate fully why or how this touched me. But it did.
