Review: The Shannara Chronicles
Shannara relies far too often upon chance encounters in forests—a kind of uncanny return, time and again, to the story’s protagonists.
Shannara relies far too often upon chance encounters in forests—a kind of uncanny return, time and again, to the story’s protagonists.
Not long after my twenty-third birthday, I ducked into a restaurant bathroom and noticed something odd in the mirror. I squinted and leaned across the sink to confirm what I was seeing.
Faced with what the Justice Minister called “a new dimension of organized criminality” (a stark departure from “relaxed”), Germany is asking itself questions.
So lately I find myself trying, instead, to think less often about my insecurities and shortcomings, and to focus more on the person in front of me who is accepting me for who I am.
Frankly, if I didn’t have neighbors, I might open the door one morning and yell it into the sky. It might feel liberating, like skinny-dipping in the Pacific or popping a balloon.
So, in the immortal words of Usher and St. Augustine, these are my confessions. Fellow lit lovers, I have failed you.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
I’ve missed Saturdays. It’s been years since I had a proper one. In fact, it’s possible that I never have.
So there is some loss, too, in coming back, in confronting memory with reality, nostalgia with the irrepressible present, which is always other than I imagined it. I am other than I imagined at seven (or eight, or nine).
I’m afraid that I’ll settle and never do anything I set out to do. I’m worried that life will slip by and I’ll be an old man saying, “If only I hadn’t settled for anything less than butterflies, I’d be a butterfly by now and not a caterpillar.”