But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.

"Well, I don't know what will happen now.  We've got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn't matter with me now.  Because I've been to the mountaintop.  And I don't mind."

Martin Luther King, Jr. said these words the day before he was assassinated.  I had read his last speech for the first time a couple weeks ago, and this quote continues to haunt me to this night.  It feels like a sturdy hand on a shoulder, a last smile before a fade to white, a last promise to us, a last request we must keep.

Sometimes, it feels like all great people become prescient of their deaths a little.  Maybe it is simply mundane movements that, through hindsight, transforms into strange prophecies.

I think these simple sentences, with simple meaning but also depth of meaning.  It's Neruda's "Eso es todo," or Danticat's "Dye mon, gen mon."  It is final and sad and beautiful and sorta hurtful, in a kind way.

I read a heartbreaking poem not long after I read that speech, John Updike's "Dog's Death.  I suggest never reading it because you will die and I do not need that drama, but take my word when I say that the words "Good dog" are the saddest things you will ever read.

I think these are my favorite works, and it is why I prefer vignettes, short stories, poems to novels.  There is an intimacy.  There is something weirdly honest and true.  Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is a, perhaps surprisingly, amazing film.  In a shallow glance, it is a period romantic comedy, but there is depth in this simple film.  Right outside of a party of the London's youth, on the edge of the Second World War, an older man tells an older woman, "I don't think I can bear it again."

One of my favorite scenes in The History Boys is a quiet one: Hector, the English teacher of "General Studies", and Posner, the student who remembered all the songs, sit and talk about Thomas Hardy's "Drummer Hodge".  Hector explains to Posner,

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

For me, I think it is something different.  There is that moment, in those unadorned words, these characters, these personae, these voices flare up in fierce softness and they are more alive than me.