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Tom Chaney: Clear Shadows of Hope's Persistence Of Writers And Their Books: "Clear Shadows of Hope's Persistence." Tom reviews Possessed by Shadows by his friend Donigan Merritt who was asking him to read some things Donigan was writing in the late 1960s. This column first appeared 22 June 2008. The next earlier Tom Chaney column: "A Merrier Companion There Never Was" By Tom Chaney "Clear Shadows of Hope's Persistence" This week's column is about friendship and love. Love between two climbers Tom and his wife Molly and them knowing Molly must die and Tom and Molly choosing how they must live in the shadow of her impending death. The book is by Donigan Merritt, Possessed by Shadows [Other Press, 2005]. Tom Valen and Molly Cook meet as climbers at Joshua Tree in California. Molly is one of the best female rock climbers and the daughter of a renowned climber. "My father's most important gift to me is the self-confidence bred in mountains, the pastime that has dominated my life. He made me a climber. "From my mother I received imagination, the gift of words and dreams.... She read to me.... I grew up craving the telling of stories, fascinated by storytellers. I wanted to be one, but instead I married one." And she and Tom are married -- a marriage made holy by high mountains and difficult peaks. Climbing in California Molly is struck unconscious by a rock kicked off a trail by a careless hiker leaning over to watch the climbers. Tom and friends rescue her, but in reading the x-ray, Molly's doctor discovers an inoperable brain tumor marching its relentless path to the destruction of Molly. Possessed by Shadows then proceeds first in the voice of Tom and then of Molly as they decide how to live. Tom leaves his university teaching post to devote himself to Molly's dwindling life. The title of the book comes from "The Sonnets to Orpheus" by Rainer Maria Rilke: Already possessed by shadows, with illness near,Molly describes meeting Tom, "I am amazed at how things work. The utter randomness of it all. The blindness. I had just met and spoken to the man I would love and live with for the rest of my life, and except for this sudden and vague feeling of hunger, the moment passed with no more weight or importance than saying hello to a friendly passerby. Every moment of our lives is pure potentiality, Tom has said." They spend their honeymoon amongst the peaks of Switzerland and they climb in the mountains of Czechoslovakia with Tom's friend Stefan. And it is to Stefan in Czechoslovakia that they return when Molly's end is near. From the hospital bed Molly whispers to Tom that "it is time." Accompanied by Stefan, Tom carries her to a wide ledge high on the Gerlach Ridge in the mountains -- a place she has told Tom she wishes to be at the end. And in her last coherent journal entry she wrote, "I came into being. I was named. I inhabited spaces. I did things. Things were done in spite of me, to me. I will cease being. It is the most common of human stories. I don't know another way to tell it. "I only sought a way to say, I am . . . And if the earthly no longer knows your name,At the beginning I said this was a column about love and friendship. Tom and Molly tell of love in a way that soars above the maudlin, punctuated by the clank of pitons being driven into rock, the crunch of a pick in ice, and the whisper of an empty rope losing its climber. The friendship has less to do with the novel than with my pride in the ideas and craftsmanship of a dear friend. When I arrived to teach at Southern State College in Magnolia, Arkansas, in the fall of 1965, Henry Donigan Merritt was one of the first people I met. He was never a student of mine -- good judgment on his part, I suppose, but he quickly became a friend showing up at my house at all hours for talk or for me to read something he wrote. I left after a couple of years and he did too -- leaving for Michigan and for a stint on a fishing boat out of Hawaii. We stayed in touch. In 1970 I moved to Iowa to teach theatre at Simpson College. Donigan, by then, was bored with the islands -- too pleasant too much of the time he said. He enrolled as a philosophy major at Simpson taking high honors at graduation. I returned to Kentucky, Donigan to the Iowa Writers' Workshop; marriage; Coronado, California; six novels; and some years in Europe with his diplomat wife. Tom Chaney can be found telling stories, planning his next meal, and occasionally selling books at THE BOOKSTORE Box 73 / 111 Water Street Horse Cave, Kentucky 42749 270-786-3084 Email: Tom Chaney http://www.alibris.com/stores/horscave The Sonnets to Orpheus -- Sonnet 25 This story was posted on 2013-06-23 04:58:09
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Tom Chaney: A Merrier Companion there never was Tom Chaney: The Joy of Drinking Tom Chaney: Bank Robbery in Hart County Tom Chaney: The Narcotic Moment of Creative Bliss Tom Chaney: Margaret Vance Anderson, Glasgow native Tom Chaney: Atticking, Attaching, Attocking Tom Chaney: Here be Dragons - Back in Kentucky Tom Chaney: Joyful Spring Tom Chaney: The Exhausted Aftermath Tom Chaney: The Dark Side of History View even more articles in topic Tom Chaney: Of Writers and Their Books |
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