I am about to spoil a big part of Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," so if that book is on your list, read no further!

About a third of the way into the book, which is thick with rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (see, e.g., "He saw the tide line -- shell bits and turnip parings, paper, fish racks, shark cartilage, culch" or "Even the mudflat was matte"), Toby Maytree leaves his wife Lou. They had been very much in love and his departure is a shock that the characters spend the rest of the book absorbing. Lou copes by climbing a monument in town with broad views of "flat sky, flat sea, and flat land" of Cape Cod. High up in the salty air, surveying the scraped world below her, Lou begins to learn to let go.

"For one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having let go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task."

Thirty pages later, her son Pete, a fisherman, has a similar desire to ascend out of emotional turmoil into cool recollection.

"Could he surmount his trash-ditch thoughts and work above them? Could he let them come and go without bias, minnows schooling about his feet? Simply slosh through them and let the waves wash over? He could build on the mainmast a crow's nest. With his life, with his mind, he would build him a crow's nest, rope by rope and plank by plank for as long as it took."

Lou's actual monument has become a monument of the mind -- a way of being apart, above, out of the wrack and wreckage of investment and disappointment. Lou, heaving herself up actual steps, realizes the distance she is covering and the immensity of her task. She is quitting Toby like a drug and can only stand to do so for a minute at a time. Pete, too, recognizes the paintstaking nature of the work of self-removal. Rope by rope. Plank by plank. For as long as it takes.