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This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn

En av de böcker som gjorde störst intryck på mig när jag läste den i tonåren!

”This is All – The Pillow book of Cordelia Kenn” är Cordelias dagbok från det att hon är 16 fram till dess att hon fyller 20 år. I boken får vi ta del av allt hon tänker, känner och går igenom – Helt utan filter. Det handlar om hur det är att vara tonåring, att bli vuxen, att begå misstag som blir till erfarenheter och om att hitta sin plats.

Boken beskriver den första kärleken, kärleken mellan vänner, kärleken till sig själv och kärleken till familjen. Men kanske först och främst, kärleken till Ordet.

(P.S. Boken finns även på svenska!)

Här kommer ett mastigt citat:

“I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?”