ryan.smith.blog

I'm reading "The Alphabet Of Grace" by Frederick Buechner (pronounced Beekner) right now. Buechner has a way of articulating everything you thought was impossible to articulate about human existence. Here's one of my favorite passages:

"Beneath the face I am a family plot. All the people I have ever been are buried there - the bouncing boy, his mother's pride; the pimply boy and secret sensualist; the reluctant infantryman; the beholder at dawn through hospital plate-glass of his first-born child. All these selves I was I am no longer, not even these bodies they wore are my body any longer, and although when I try, I can remember scraps and pieces about them, I can no longer remember what it felt like to live inside their skin. Yet they live inside my skin to this day, they are buried in me somewhere, ghosts that certain songs, tastes, smells, sights, tricks of weather can raise, and although I am not the same as they, I am not different either because their having been is responsible for my being now. I am like a candle lit from a candle lit from a candle, as Gautama said, the traveling flame never the same and never different either. And buried in me too are all the people I have not been yet but might be someday - the Boston Strangler and St. John of the Cross, Heliogabulus and Dagwood Bumstead, Judas Iscariot and Robin Hood and Little Nell, all the lives not yet lived like promises not yet kept, dreams waiting for or dreading the possibility of being dreamed."

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