More passages from A View from Castle Rock

I have another couple of quotes that I want to note. I guess I put these up, not so much because the writing in them is more worthy of posting than others, but because they speak to thoughts I've had about immigration, and descendants, and life in general.

from "The Wilds of Morris Township"

"To think what their ancestors did," he said. "The nerve it took, to pick up and cross the ocean. What was it squashed their spirits? So soon."

I remember visiting family in England--their existence was a surprise--and talking to my aunt (I call her than, but she was probably some degree of cousin once removed). She, like the majority of my "aunts" and female family acquaintances, was a nurse. Being a nurse in England is apparently not like being a nurse in the U.S. Here I imagine that the relative scarcity of nurses made it easy to live well by working hard. There, it seemed that the same hard work yielded less, because living in England (especially London) seemed to be that much more expensive, and probably the health care system's place in society made a difference as well. I think of my parents who both work in what I would call upscale private hospitals, with wood floors and glass walls and cafès for patients (and cafeterias for staff, where I ate when I either worked or volunteered at either hospital). These are things that are probably not so common in a socialized health care system, though honestly I don't really know.

I'm digressing--my point was that I was talking to this aunt, and she mentioned how either her son or another child of his generation was thinking of becoming a nurse. And of how, well, disappointing, or something to that effect this was. She had emigrated after all, became a nurse to facilitate that move to another country and away from home, and now when these children of a new generation, with all the supposed opportunities available to them bought by their parents' sacrifice--why become a nurse?

How different from my mother's reaction; even now she points out that in difficult times nursing would have been at least an available back-up option. But that was the point I guess--the security of it. Her ambition was limited to money, and did not extend to career. And she likes her job, which I think she does well. I wonder sometimes if she feels the strain of this choice now, as I suspect my father always has.

from "Working for a Living"

He was edging towards a life he probably could not clearly visualize, since he would know what he didn't want so much better than what he wanted.

Ah, such is life. I used to wonder at those people who were in law school who always knew that they wanted to be there, whereas the year previous I had barely known, only knew what I didn't want. I'm not special or unique in this, I know, but I think people like me in this way are less apt to talk about how we end up where we are than those whose lives are guided by the certainty we lack.


As I am at the halfway point, I am thinking of nominating this book for the most incongrous (or at least misleading) book cover of the year. Maybe it's more in keeping with what I'll find in the second half of the book, but so far there's been nothing which suggests the chicklit vibe the cover gives off. I'm all for chicklit, but only when appropriately labeled.

UPDATE: Ha, it looks like the book cover matches my site, or vice-versa as I saw the book cover first. I was actually going for that chicklit-ish look, to go with the title if nothing else.