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Dave Eggers' The Wild Things is available for preorder, in regular hardcover and
limited-edition fur-covered.
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On Salvation.BY JUSTIN MARKS
it's impossibly laborious. How can anyone penetrate the impenetrable— break from this world to that, and feel the touch of even the shadow of divine light? No one has explained that very well. All seems mere prescription of do this; do not do that. Prescriptions cannot lead to salvation. They aren't even satisfying explanations, temporary fixes that, in the end, leave you to labor over what was wrong originally. What of the loving touch of another human? Couldn't that pierce all that is impenetrable, if not in the most hardened, then at least in a nearly impenetrable soul? Many have taken pure indulgence as prescription for the afflictions of this world. Sure, some go a touch too far, some further. But who's to say groping at salvation like that is wrong. It's not exactly laborious, all that carousing and chaos without reason or explanation other than ... Exactly, that's it. There needn't be explanation, long as it all amounts to some blind, mad stab at the impenetrable, the impossible. And being saved doesn't have to be laborious, does it? Who's to say labor isn't just another prescription against the allusiveness of salvation. But at the same time, that no one can touch enough flesh, be touched enough by it, is clear. But touched, why can't the word alone be sufficient explanation? Was there not a time when it as an epithet was salvation, a guaranteed place in the otherwise impenetrable other world? But that too has become false prescription, which puts us back where we started, with labor, which remains, well, laborious, and leaves us to this life, longing for the touch of the thing itself, the absent Provider-of-the-Scripture-and-Son, who is all, and at once, without explanation ... the impenetrable, which, if it were otherwise, would be salvation, without need for explanation, no longer impenetrable, a fiction ... and salvation.
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