Let The Great World Spin

Just finished Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin while sitting in the fading light on the upstairs back deck of a crisp spring evening, a high white half moon overhead in a milky blue sky. My first reaction was to stand up and look around at the neighborhood, the backyards of the neighbors that I could see from my elevated vantage point, and further, across the way to Priest St and the cars passing there, and it occurred to me how amazing literature can be, how it can reach right in and touch the essential part of us, the core place where humanity lurks within everyone, the love place, love between family members, the amazing place of universal oneness, and I felt sad then, looking across the houses and the parked cars, thinking about the poverty of people’s lives in this culture imbued as they are with the superficialities of sports and television shows, and I wondered admiringly about Colum McCann’s great achievement, his deeply rendered portrait of that human place, I felt it, embraced it, and despite whatever sadness I felt for the lack of this brilliance in the cultural ebb and flow, I also felt euphoric, amazed, enthused, my heart beating with a determined thump, my eye wide open to the beauty around me.