Three Dollars

My favourite two paragraphs from Three Dollars by Elliot Perlman:

"My concentration seemed to evaporate on contact with any of the required reading and I found myself attempting to learn by rote, a sure sign of quintessential floundering. I paced my bedroom repeated with emphasis that it is movements of the earth's crust along with subsequent weathering and rock displacement that provides for mineral formation and relocation into the site lines. I understood what they were but it was at this point that my attention would float off the page to a world where there was no fault and the original layers of rock formed by sedimentary or chemical processes were never distorted into folds to produce synclines and anticlines, but rather that we were always inclined toward each other, as we were at the beginning.

I knew that where the folding is sufficiently severe, the rock is frequently heavily fractured, particularly where it is under tension. But equilibrium on the surface of the earth was a thing of the past. At the end of four or more hours at my desk, this was all I really knew."


Take some time to reflect on it; it is filled with many double entendres with emotions disguised wittily as geographic facts and how they are merged together to display how human emotions permeates forcefully inside the minds of an individual.