Stopping to Smell the Flowers

One of the great pleasures of literature is the unexpected: Those “insignificant” passages that, while you are engrossed in the narrative, make you pause. It is as if you are running along a path when suddenly a flower or some other unexpected small distraction causes you to halt your run, perhaps even leaving you wondering why you stopped. This is a novelist’s craft and unique talent, to create such a passage that may seem insignificant yet which speaks to us profoundly in some way. Oh, and to somehow make it appear effortless. 

This passage from Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea struck me this way:

But let’s suppose another way of considering her, which was that she had a special conviction of imagination. Few of us do, to be honest. We wish and wish and often with fury but never very deeply. For if we did, we’d see how the world can sometimes split open, in just the way we hope. That it and we are, in fact, unbounded. Free.