strange blessing

I’m working on a literacy narrative, an autoethnography, for my Literacy Studies class, and I just came across this quote from Mike Rose.  I like the sense of loving/accepting our histories, no matter how much we wish they had been “better,” and the line about the world inviting and denying language.  Very true.

Desire gets confused on South Vermont. There were times when I wanted so much to be other than what I was, to walk through the magical gate of a television cottage. But strange blessing, we can never really free ourselves from the mood of early neighborhoods, from our first stories, from the original tales of hope and despair. There are basic truths about the vulnerability and power of coming to know, about the way the world invites and denies language. This is what lies at the base of education—to be tapped or sealed over or distorted, by others, by us.

- Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary, p. 240