Peter Lake and the perfectly just city.

"The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule."
Winter's Tale

Do you ever think about what you were doing a year ago at this time? A month ago? A week ago?

Fun game, until you remember that last Saturday morning you were crying in public in a coffee shop. That's right...weeping in front of a bunch of happy strangers who are just there to get their morning coffee. Those of you who don't know me may be more perplexed to hear this, but those who do will be unsurprised to hear that I was crying over a book.



[I wish I could say this was the first time, but there's also the infamous Don Pablos-meets-Death Comes for the Archbishop incident of 2006...]

I don't know why I chose to finish Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale in public, but I clearly wasn't thinking it through. This book is, in my opinion [and in Helprin's, which means a bit more], his masterpiece. Every single page was full of fanciful, challenging, intimidating ideas beautifully expressed. I loved the characters immediately....I would have dropped everything and fought for them with the loyalty of a family member had I run across them in their struggles in real life. Many books stay with you after you read them, but few make you feel like you have been lifted and shaped into something better when you are finished. I wish I could give a brief synopsis of the plot to entice you to read it, but that doesn't work for Helprin. [Even the paragraph on the back cover of Winter's Tale makes it sound like something other than what it is, and much worse.] I'll just give you a random paragraph that might not have the impact that it does when surrounded by a whole book of equally loaded paragraphs [and Irish burglars, and little girls who transcend time, and a bridge builder who works with light, and a pet rooster, and races across frozen lakes, and a horse (sometimes) named Athansor...]:

"The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn't matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God."

Read it. If you allow it to [you should], it will devastate you, and if you work at it, it will remake you.