| oh orson |

I’m in love with an author. yep, finally found one that I can confidently use as my answer when people ask me who my favorite author is. favorite book is still far outside my ability to identify, so you might as well not even try.

why orson scott card? because he’s a brilliant sci-fi writer, but he doesn’t just write science fiction. he infuses his books with so much philosophy, theology, and ingenious truth that sometimes my jaw drops as I’m reading. like for example, I just picked up xenocide, and in the first three pages alone, I’m speechless. we haven’t even gotten into the story, and I’d love to be able to quote all three pages so that others could read what I’m reading. in fact, stay tuned for a passage excerpt at the end. I’d put it right here in the middle, but I think I’d lose people.. the ones that don’t value reading and philosophy like I do, and I want you to hear the great story about how I got introduced to the writer.

in eighth grade, I met a boy that was cynical and intelligent and world weary. he was famous, and I didn’t know it. then when I did, it didn’t matter. that’s why we were friends. unfortunately, we didn’t stay friends through high school, but that’s another story for another day. so here we are, on a bus on our way to a field trip, and I’m bored out of my mind. he has a book with him that he lets me borrow.. though it isn’t a book in the normal sense of the word. it looks like a manuscript; computer paper bound with that old school black spiral binding. on the front there’s some writing, I wish I could remember what it says, but it’s signed Orson Scott Card. On the top there’s a set of numbers, one of those # out of # copies, and though I don’t remember the numbers, I remember it was one of few with the words Original Manuscript scrawled along the top. I began reading, and as I get through the first few pages, I pause just long enough to ask him how he has it. why he has it.

he tells me, in that trying-too-hard-to-sound-nonchalant voice, that they were considering making a movie out of the book, and were scouting him for the role of Bean. I nodded, and kept reading. it didn’t mean much to me. whoever he had been wasn’t who he was now. that was as far as I let my mind run with it. so I kept reading until the bus stopped, and even then I was the last one out of the seat, and the last one off the bus, and the whole time I held it up in front of my face reading. I convinced him to let me borrow it, and after a quick speech about how much trouble he’d be in if he lost it, he conceded. I was sick that whole next week, but the book eased things along. the book, the story, completely enraptured me. from that point on, I’ve loved his books. his character development, his imagination.. and I owe my introduction to that boy. that manuscript. I really wish they would make a movie out of the book, though I’m afraid they might not do it justice.

so yes, the passage I promised. as far as I can tell, there’s a woman dying (Jiang-quing) from a slow, debilitating disease, and her husband (Han Fei-tzu) is unhappy about it. lamenting. what you’d expect. their conversation, as she lies on her death bed and he on the floor, is priceless. this is only a small part of it. I’d love to retype all 4 pages so you can read it, but I have a feeling that no one would sit here and read that much. (:

“The desire of the spirit,” said Jiang-qing, insisting.

“Because the spirit is of the earth, it is that part which makes new things out of old ones. The husband longs for all the unfinished things that he and his wife were making when she died, and all the unstarted dreams of what they would have made if she had lived. Thus a man grows angry at his children for being too much like him and not enough like his dead wife. Thus a man hates the house they lived in together, because either he does not change it, so that it is as dead as his wife, or because he does change it, so that it is no longer half of her making.”