Caldwell Smith Quotes

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell, she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in her path (beer cans, branches). This compulsion, applied to other fields, manifested itself as "intelligence." Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary--in search of something like "completion"--and every book led to another book, a process that, of course, could never be completed. This route through early life gave her no small portion of joy, and, indeed, it seemed at first that her desires and her capacities were basically aligned. She wanted to read things--could not resist wanting to read things--and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook for intelligence was in fact only a sort of mutation of the will?

There had been an attempt over the summer to mix that Camden Lock lot with this Caldwell lot, but Keisha Blake did not especially care for Baudelaire or Bukowski or Nick Drake or Sonic Youth or Joy Division or boys who looked like girls or vice versa or Anne Rice or William Burroughs of Kafka's Metamorphosis or CND or Glastonbury or the Situationists or Breathless or Samuel Beckett or Andy Warhol or a million other Camden things, and when Keisha brought a wondrous Monie Love 7-inch to play on Leah's hi-fi there was something awful in the way Leah blushed and conceded it was probably OK to dance to. They had only Prince left, and he was wearing thin.

Late in the spring of 1837, apostles Thomas Marsh, David Patten, and William Smith left their homes in Missouri and set out for Kirtland. Many of the Saints in Zion were now settled along a stream called Shoal Creek, about fifty miles northeast of Independence. There they had founded a town called Far West, using Joseph’s plan for the city of Zion as their guide to lay out the settlement. Hoping to find a peaceful solution to the Saints’ ongoing problems with their neighbors, the Missouri legislature had organized Caldwell County, which encompassed the land around Far West and Shoal Creek, for the settlement of the Saints.1

Another day, another pang that you are afar.