The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions
Rick Moody
Language: English
Pages: 323
ISBN: 0316578991
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In his early 20s, a lifetime of excess left Rick Moody suddenly stranded in a depression so profound that he feared for his life. A stay in a psychiatric hospital was just the first step out of mental illness. In this astonishingly inventive book, Moody tells the story of his collapse and recovery in an inspired journey through what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and healed. Woven through his own story, Moody also traces his familys paternal line, looking for clues to his own melancholyin particular to one ancestor, Reverend Joseph Moody, about whom Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an archetypal story of shame called The Ministers Black Veil. In a brilliant display that is no less than a literary tour de force, Moody ties past and present, family legend, and serious scholarship into a book that will draw comparisons not just to recent memoirs by Dave Eggers and Martin Amis but to forebears like Nabokovs Speak, Memory.
merit. And so forth. There are many such passages. Two further examples that do not take up the matter of concealing masterpieces have instead to do with the oppression of conscience. In the first of these, a character involved in a murder goes to the Church of Rome to unburden herself: Close at hand, within the veil of the confessional, was the relief; in the second instance, the veil is directly conjoined to the expression of remorse: It occurred to him that
final, incontrovertible splatter. They stand on the table in the cafeteria, or lie in wait in a ditch out in front of school, having pulled the fire alarm, in silence, perfect in the knowledge that they are about to venture the last word, the last of all words. So it seems. In the elongation of time that takes place during their apotheosis, all other attempts at communication are laughable. But then comes the inevitable reloading pause, or else vengeance seems
I doing inside? As Kafka says in his letter to his father, Dearest father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. The whole processional of fathers and their histories is a burden,
They may mean this or they may mean that. Which, of course, is exactly the ambiguity that Hooper himself affects: Thus, from beneath the black veil, there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. It is not only that the veil itself is valent, reflective of the interpreter. The Reverend Hooper also confers his own motives on whoever turns the leaves of his pages, as (J.)
The premises had been robbed several times, were depleted of antiques, were noteworthy more for memorabilia of Sally’s family these days than for anything relating to Handkerchief’s son’s tenure there, or so she told me. Most of this memorabilia dated from the period when the road to York Beach and Cape Neddick went right past the front door, with a heavy volume of sightseers, with people from away, recreational vehicles, fishing boats in tow. This was a past