Ethan...

I finished reading, several days ago, Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.

I read here and there one person or another referring to it, Anita Shrieve stating it was her favorite book that launched her into writing, and I had missed it in highschool, if our high school read it.

The day I finished it, I thought, "Huh. Well. I don't see the big deal. Interesting, but hmmm."

After a few days, it grew on me. I found myself thinking back to it often. I read an "introduction to Ethan Frome" which reminded me why such as avid reader as I HATED high school English. I hate over-analyzing a story with intellectual hypothesis, and this theory, and that interpretation and why the rock was grey and where the path turned left, rather than wound left... sigh..

I love to read a book with my soul. Not dissect it.

So my soul has wound back to Ethan Frome quite frequently this week.

-The harshness of his life, the shabbiness it became, a different time, a different lifestyle. Slower pace, less enticements.

-The electricity of attraction. So often, in modern romance, we charge on through all those little things, and blasted on past, we never look back, or savor them. The pace of our {my} life is such that there is not much I get to {take the time to} savor. I want to change that. Some how.

-Hopelessness and the sense of being trapped. I can find myself in a trapped situation at times, or what feels like trapped. But I find I do not lose hope. I may have to hold on and wait and work my way through for a while to get out. But I truly do understand that sense of trapped without an option. With my hope in God, trapped is a different word. I remember in my 20's, a time when I had walked away from God, I was draw to an author/speaker's work, Leo Buscaglia. One of the things he said, {quoting another} that use to bring me hope, was "Nikos Kazantzakis says, "You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint paradise, then in you go." Do it!! Take orange and magenta and blue and purple. . . and green, and yellow--and paint your paradise." I have always held onto the hope of change.

Now I can say I have read Ethan Frome. I read there was a movie made of the story. I may have to search it out.