You Should Go Read This

To be real, most blogs are not very good. This one is. Just look at this exquisite writing:

...I read a lot of Saki, of Jane Austen, of literature that reflected a world that was quieter, and more witty, and more delicate. I spent hours listening to Chopin, lying on my stomach in the hayloft with the pale stripes of light filtered through the lace of leaves fluttering as the wind changed. I stopped talking because no one understood a word I said. And so I rejected everything I knew because it was dirty and ugly. There were places, I was convinced, where people had all their teeth and pigs escaping didn't make front page news in the paper. I wanted to go there and live with people who liked what I liked and thought what I thought. Places where people didn't shackle their minds to what God wanted and what everyone would say to their grandmama when they found out.

So I left and went to live among the Real People. And those Real People didn't understand a word I said, because they were from towns with sidewalks and their parents sent them to Europe for summer and the idea of having drank well water for eighteen years was outside of anything in their experience but Faulkner. I marvelled at people who could go to Europe as if it were the state fair. And I found that those Real People irritated me with their assumptions about the people I'd been raised with as much as the people I'd been raised with annoyed me. These were people who had never had to sit in a dim room with their dying grandmother and hear the argument in the next room about who would inherit her trailer. These were people who thought they understood hardship and they thought hardship was not having enough money to rent movies. The Real People were soft with indulgence and fancied themselves strong.

Read the whole thing.