Friday, 10 October 2014

Time Will Darken It

"The beautiful blind passion of running away is permitted only to children, convicts, and slaves. If you are subject to the truant officer and the Law of Bedtime there will be doorways that will shelter you and freight cars that will take you a long way from home. If you are a safecracker and cannot walk in a straight line for more than a hundred yards without coming face to face with a high stone wall, there are ways of tunnelling under the wall, under the five-year sentence, and confederates waiting outside. If you cannot own property but are owned yourself, you may, hiding in the daytime and travelling across country back roads at night, eventually reach the border. But if you any free person tries to run away he will discover sooner or later that he has been running all the while in a circle and that this circle is taking him inexorably back to the person or place he ran away from. The free person who runs away is no better off than a fish with a hook in his mouth, given plenty of line so that he can tire himself out and be reeled in calmly and easily by his own destiny." 
William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

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