Crossing to Safety | Part 4

“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.” —p. 324Welcome back to Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. In this episode, Shari and Rhea find themselves without words… more than once…! They talk about Charity’s way of controlling everything to the very end, and how still after all that, they couldn’t dislike her, or harbor ill feelings toward her. They talk about Sid and Larry’s simultaneous “journeys” they took at the end, and how each one came out on the other side. They talk about dying “right” v. dying “well,” living “right” v. living “well,” and how the two inform one another. They talk about fate, forgiveness, and the way suffering has the mysterious gift of enlarging us if we’ll let it. Finally, Shari declares Crossing to Safety as one of her top five books of all time—a statement that, if you’ve been listening to R&W for any length of time, you know she doesn’t make easily.Below is The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca that was mentioned multiple times in the narrative and acted as a critical image in the last section of the story. Our next book is Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery. Our first episode of that four-part series will air April 14th. Thanks for listening to this edition of The Reader & the Writer! If you like this post, ❤️ it and pass it along.The Reader & the Writer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support the literary work we’re doing, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Reader & the Writer at thereaderandthewriter.substack.com/subscribe