A good friend and amazing reader told me that Cormac McCarthy's book The Road is the best book she has read. I was shocked, thinking of Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch, and, last night, I decided to enter the book, and I stopped to sleep and then woke up and finished the book this morning at seven. I recommend the book.
I give the last paragraph which I don't think does anything to diminish or give away the ending. It stands on its own. As to the best book, it is a book of our times, just as the above two books gave us their times. We are each here to carry the fire and we do. May this continue so.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
And maybe that is all we need to know today and everyday.
It is our place to "carry the fire," and live with compassion and to love with thorough and unwavering pulse and trust in the goodness we are and continue to be.