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Borderland
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
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Borderland When too much light falls on everything a special terror results. Annie Dillard In summer the sky goes flat and rapacious. Thirsty doves hurl themselves through it and mountains rise up against the light’s authority but they can hide nothing. Visiting rivers and relatives never stay very long. What are we possessed by? Love of a place? Fear of a place? Devils? As our fair flesh burns we remain where those before us have bowed to the light and created monuments to the transcendence of suffering, but we have no gift for suffering. That is for the permanent poor who cross the desert on foot to work or die, who offer us their hands for our labor that we might be free to find redemption or pleasure, who forgive us our lives, our complicity. Their bodies are candles burning for us so we will not stumble on our pathway to God. 19 ...