"The Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford, a reading journal (15)

Are you ready to meet your maker?

As the novel unfolds and runs its course, Frank is coming closer to shore, his quest resolved or merely uncovered. The title phrase unveiled little by little, let the dead lie. Getting ready to close the circle, full and alive and coming back to the first question.

"What have I now accepted that visits me in my stale bedroom, where I'm warm and dank beneath the covers, my stack of unread books beside me, and at an unknown but indecent hour? What is it that rocked me like an ague, turned me loose like a flimsy ribbon on a zephir? All these years and modes of accomodation, of coping, of living with, of negotiating the world in order to fit in - my post-divorce dreaminess, the long period of existence in the early middle passage, the states of acceptable longing, of being a variablist, even the Permanent Period itself - these now seem not to be forms of acceptance the way I thought, but forms of fearful nonacceptance, the laughing/grimacing masks of denial"(...) (p. 532)

What better question to ask on the 31st of December of a redeeming year when, at last, the good icicles have outnumbered the other ones, on the brink of life, having walked on water, on the very edge of the abyssal zone. Floodgates about to open, let the better one win.