I was challenged yesterday by a friend when I lazily reposted this quote from Langston Hughes, or actually just the first half. The quote I shared stopped before the knife was revealed. It gave a bluesy kinda vibe that gelled with how I was felling at the moment. The knife changes everything. And like everything these day, it seems to make me think of the books we have been reading.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan realizing the worms he had put in the ear of Smerdyakov…
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is forced to face his three ghostly worms,
In Frankenstein, Victor was unwilling to face his own worms and is haunted by his creation,
In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell sees the worms, and shrinks back.
In East of Eden, Samuel and Lee patiently wrestle out the worms.
In A Doll’s House, Nora watches Torvald read the letter, finally to face the worms in her home.
In Antigone, blind Tiresias driven to anger, lays out the truth of the worms to Creon,
And in The Great Gatsby, that yellow car finally spilling the truth out for Nick, the worms that had been there from the beginning.
Not that heaven can be made of earth, but that good comes from facing unwelcomed truths. And not the world with its streets and telephones and worms of the earth, but the world in my eyes and the worms I have let infest my view. That this will take work, and I may have to face some pain.
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