I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

“Mostly, I can just accept it, you know? That total absorption of his—the way his illness finally did what I’d been trying all my life to do: separate the two of us. Untwin us. But I’ll be honest with you. There have been times when I’ve ached to have him back again. When I’ve needed him bad.”

“The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

They threw me: those out-of-nowhere moments when he seemed to have some inkling of his own sorry dilemma. That it wasn’t the Communists or the Iraqis or the CIA, but his own brain. Those little flickers of insight were almost worse than his Loony Toon business-as-usual. You’d see for just a second or two who was trapped inside there. Who Thomas might have been.

A Board member named Mrs. Birdsall wanted to know how Thomas was getting on with the day-to-day routines at Hatch?

It is the firstborn’s burden to unravel the knots that younger brothers make.

I was already a dead man. Breathing was just a technicality.

Our being human made us tragic and comic both, she had said; the gods both laughed and wept.

“Where there is no shadow, there is no light. Heaven help the heretic!”

Depression was, in some ways, a crisis of energy.

Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.

Roughly, “Cook squash any way you like, but it’s still squash.” —NF