From a book review of “In the Valley of the Shadow”, a new book by James Kugel … “Faced with his own mortality and the weakening effects of chemotherapy, Kugel suddenly feels very small. He notices the size of open graves: “Can a whole human being fit in there, a whole human life?” He realizes that as soon as he got his cancer diagnosis, the distracting melodies of work and family had come to a stop. “It had always been there, the music of daily life that’s constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities; and now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence,” he writes. “There you are, one little person, sitting in the late summer sun, with only a few things left to do.”
The book sounds interesting, focused on what the review says is “a state of mind notoriously resistant to literary exploration: the state of mind in which you intuit something on the order of God.”
In a way, it’s sad that so many people can’t easily reach that state of mind, where they can really feel God. Perhaps it is our fear of mortality that keeps us from that sense. Denial maybe. It is hard to imagine what we will feel when we are that “one little person” … I pray that we can somehow get nearer to that intuition, before we are forced to.
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