I love thinking about why an author has decided on the title for their book. Unless by Carol Shields had a whole paragraph on it. Although when I started thinking too hard about it my brain became all scrambled.
'Unless is the worry word of the English language. It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence. Unless - that's the little subjunctive mineral you carry in your pocket crease. It's always there, or else not there....
Unless you're lucky; unless you're healthy, fertile, unless you're loved and fed.... Unless provides a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light, the reverse side of not enough.'Carol Shields Unless
'Unless is the worry word of the English language. It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence. Unless - that's the little subjunctive mineral you carry in your pocket crease. It's always there, or else not there....
Unless you're lucky; unless you're healthy, fertile, unless you're loved and fed.... Unless provides a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light, the reverse side of not enough.'Carol Shields Unless
unless
What do you think? Is it the 'worry word of the English language' or do you think there's another 'worry word'?
I don't know if it is, although it often feels as though saying it is an insurance against the wrong thing happening. But I do love this quote about worrying from, I think, Alain de Botton: "happiness is generally impossible for more than 15 minutes. We are the descendents of creatures who, above all else, worried."
ReplyDeleteWhich is kind of reassuring.
I totally agree with Tonia, I remember reading that quote she posted once and thinking "thank God I'm not the only one". For me the worry phrase is "what if". What if I get sick, what if he gets in an accident, what if there's a tornado in the middle of the night and my parents don't go to the basement, and on and on and on and on ....
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