"I can't." How could he explain it in a way Leslie would understand, how he yearned to reach out and capture the quivering life around him and how when he tried, it slipped past his fingertips, leaving a dry fossil upon the page? "I just can't get the poetry of the trees," he said.
She nodded. "Don't worry," she said. "You will someday."
Uncle Willie was making his way down the long shadowed aisle between the shelves and the counter-- hand over hand, like a man climbing out of a dream. I stayed quiet and watched him lurch from one side, bumping to the other, until he reached the coal-oil tank. He put his hand behind that dark recess and took his cane in the strong fist and shifted his weight on the wooden support. He thought he had pulled it off.
I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said later that he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of a whole Mr. Johnson back to Little Rock.
He must have tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high-topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them.
I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since.
The Darkness seemed to seethe and writhe. Was this meant to comfort them?
Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure. Then, slowly, the shinding dwindled until it, too, was gone, and there was nothing but stars and starlight. No shadows. No fear. Only the stars and the clear darkness of space, quite different from the fearful darkness of the Thing.
"You see!" the Medium cried, smiling happily. "It can be overcome! It is being overcome all the time!"
Prof Nemur says if it werks good and its perminent they will make other pepul like me smart also. Mabye pepul all over the werld. And he said that meens Im doing something grate for sience and Ill be famus and my name will go down in the books. I dont care so much about beeing famus. I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.
How many slams in an old screen door?
Depends how loud you shut it.
How many slices in a bread?
Depends how thin you cut it.
How much good inside a day?
Depends how good you live 'em.
How much love inside a friend?
Depends how much you give 'em.
What do all of these snippets have in common? Someone, somewhere, has determined that you shouldn't read them. Every one of these excepts is from a book on the American Library Association's 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.
This isn't "I don't think that book is suitable for my child." It's not, "Some kids may be too young to handle these concepts." I'm fine with that. Parents have the right to raise their kid as they choose. And yes, not all books are appropriate for every child, or even every adult. BUT.
No one person has the right to make a blanket decision for every person's child. No one has the right to deny a great book to *all* readers because they're scared or offended by what it has to say. A good book *should* disturb you. It should scare you. It should shake up the way you think about the world. And it's not going to get the chance to do that for someone if it's not there.
So, celebrate. Be dangerous. Go read a banned book.
In order of citation:
Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia (#9)
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (#3)
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (#22)
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (#47)
Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic (#51)
Posted by gris at September 30, 2004 10:02 PM