That thing where

[asakiyume]

You dip into a book, and the part you read happens to be an iconic part of the story.

... I don't actually know if the part I read is iconic, but I bet it is. I just bet.

The book, which I've never read, is Angela's Ashes. The healing angel has to read it for school and doesn't want to, so I said, We'll read 20 minutes tonight. (That was last night.) Then this afternoon when he got home from school, I quit work for ten minutes to read another little bit. Yesterday the two brothers had to pick up leftover bits of coal from the street to light their Christmas fire, and their bag had a hole in in it, so the coal kept falling out, and then it started to rain. The rain was the icing on the cake of desolation, and we laughed like the heartless creatures we are at the awfulness.

That wasn't the moment that I think was iconic though. It was when the dad tells them that their new baby brother was brought for them by an angel who left the baby on the seventh step. Seventh from the top or the bottom of the stairs, the narrator asks. The top, the dad explains, because angels come down from heaven, not up from someplace as miserable as their flooded kitchen. And later the narrator sits on that stair waiting for the angel and imagining talking to him.

... That was beautiful and I figure it has to be iconic. Just chance that the healing angel (speaking of angels) should pick that section.

Comments

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

I love the sound of your reading - 'heartless' laughing and all. :) and I love the angels coming down the stairs, partly because it reminds me of the angels on Bath not-Cathedral ... abbey! it's an abbey! and it has by the front door the most wonderful sixteenth-century depiction in stone of angels climbing down from heaven, and of course starting from the top. :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Ooh, now I'll have to go look at images of the Bath abbey angels. They sound lovely.

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

They are stunning! They are climbing up and down ladders, and since earthly gravity or dimensions are utterly irrelevant to angels, the descending ones climb upside-down, head-downwards. It's wonderfully and joyously disorienting to see. :)