just before winter break, a fellow grad student in my cohort recommended Life of Pi to me. i picked up a copy at Lamplight Books while looking for Christmas gifts (it's now an annual tradition for me to visit the market for Christmas shopping and I always stop in at Lamplight). this book caught me up in its story in a way i don't often experience anymore. when i was a child, i spent the better part of many days with my nose buried in a book. in high school i'd often stay up well past midnight with my bed lamp on, devouring a good tale. Life of Pi brought out that kid in me and any moment of the last week that wasn't spent baking, cooking, sharing a meal with family or wrapping gifts was a opportunity to crack open my book. what a story! too many wonderful ideas to share all my favorite passages, but one particularly stayed with me:

Words of divine consciousness: moral exultation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably (p. 63).