Another Headlong, Fearful Escape...

I felt a little bit bad for hating on Against the Day yesterday, for as flawed as that book is, it still contains many excellent moments. Here's one that stuck in my head. It's from the novel's home stretch, when two characters are trying to navigate the through chaos of pre-WWI Slavic Europe with their newborn child:

... the dead, who had begun to appear in increasing numbers, like immigrants into a country where they were feared, disliked, pitilessly exploited.

As the landscape turned increasingly chaotic and murderous, the streams of refugees swelled. Another headlong, fearful escape of the kind that in collective dreams, in legends, would be misremembered and re imagined into pilgrimage or crusade... the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope ahead, the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national, delusion. Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too awful to face, thriving, emerging in disguise, vigorous, evil, destructive, inextricable. p.964

Note how the takes the specific and ties it into the universal in a poetic fashion. That's why we love the guy.