I love the epigraph for this section. It might be my favorite—there is something about it that is so exquisite and heartbreaking. But an epigraph is not an excerpt, so I picked this instead.
His clothes were stiff with sweat salt and stank and he had given this no consideration for months but in this place he felt the offense of his own stench and so removed his outer garments for washing. But once he had done so his right hand chanced into the pocket of his submerged breeches and his fingers closed on the tattered silk tricorn and he drew it again from its long dormancy and stared at it sopped and dripping in his fingers, and his thoughts fell mute as any animal, mute even to himself, until he realized he was weeping and then did all his sorrow overtake him again in the stirring beauty of that place only this time it was because of the vast and irreconcilable gulf between the word spoken by the beauty of the meadow grove and the word spoken by his own loss, and he knew himself then as alien to this landscape and without purchase in the bliss of it and sensing his own exile he wondered what airy creatures unacquainted with sorrow could ever dwell long in such a place, and then he wiped his eyes and looked upwards and fixed his intention a final time towards that clouded summit and the great question he was sworn to ask there.
Was there a passage this week that stuck out to you? If it isn't too spoilery, post it in the comments. If it is spoilery, post it in the forum—I would love to hear what you think. There are good conversations to be had.This coming Tuesday (April 11) at 7:30 Central, Andrew and Douglas McKelvey will be having a live chat on Facebook! See you there!