An eloquent quote
Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 4:04 pm
I recently came across this passage in a V.S. Naipaul novel which I thought was worth sharing. It eloquently describes a sensation which I and I’m sure many other ISSF shooters are familiar with - but he expresses it much better than I can (but then, unlike V.S. Naipaul, I don't have a Nobel Prize in literature!)
"...I was entranced the first time I looked down a gun-sight with a finger on a trigger. It seemed to me the most private, the most intense moment of conversation with oneself, so to speak, with that split-second of right decision coming and going all the time, almost answering the movements of one's mind. It wasn't at all what I was expecting. I feel that the religious excitement that is supposed to come to people who meditate on the flame of a single candle in an otherwise dark room was no greater than the pleasure I felt when I looked down a gun-sight and became very close to my own mind and consciousness. In a second the scale of things could alter and I could be lost in something like a private universe."
From Half a Life, 2001.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul
"...I was entranced the first time I looked down a gun-sight with a finger on a trigger. It seemed to me the most private, the most intense moment of conversation with oneself, so to speak, with that split-second of right decision coming and going all the time, almost answering the movements of one's mind. It wasn't at all what I was expecting. I feel that the religious excitement that is supposed to come to people who meditate on the flame of a single candle in an otherwise dark room was no greater than the pleasure I felt when I looked down a gun-sight and became very close to my own mind and consciousness. In a second the scale of things could alter and I could be lost in something like a private universe."
From Half a Life, 2001.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul