If I Had a Tumblr…

I’d post this in one of those small messages. I love Tim O’Brien, and I recently reread his short essay How To Tell a True War Story. This is one of my favorite parts:

Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when

you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love

what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your

foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and

although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things

and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder

and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world

could be and always should be, but now is not.

“Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”

- Tim O’Brien