One of my Favorite Pieces of Writing

We were asked to analyze this on class, and I liked it so much that I kept it and took it home. The following was adapted from Conrad Aiken's "Thistledown."
The dandelion seed, when it blows, does not know where it is going: it will cross miles of meadow, sail over forests of pine, travel down mountain gorges, be caught for a day in a cobweb, and at last find its growing place in the least likely of spots. It will perhaps try to grow in an old shoe, or an empty tomato tin, or a crack in a wall. And, of course, it will have no memory of the poor plant, leagues away, from which it set out on its journey. There is a kind of pathos in this, and something beautiful also. And it is with just such an image that I always think of Coralyn, that gallantest of creatures, when I try to tell her story. There is, to be quite truthful, no story- at best, only the materials for a story. Life seldom arranges itself in an obvious pattern. It may surprise us- and often does- or it may shock us, or turn swiftly from melodrama to comedy, or from humdrum to tragedy; but how few lives do we know in which there is any perceptible "form," any design of the sort that novelists employ! Coralyn's story is at best a chronicle- hardly even that. It is a series of episodes, an uneven progress in time; it is as aimless as the voyage of the dandelion thistle, and almost as purposeless. And as I look back on it, with its span of five or six years, I even wonder, sometimes, whether Coralyn, any more than the thistledown, remembered where she had come from, or knew where she was going. ... and I never knew anyone who so consistently, even recklessly, took life with both hands. It may have been this, indeed, that she was afraid of; she may have guessed, sooner than we did, and more accurately, the dark forces that were at work in her and to what end they would bring her at last. For there was little or no self-deception in Coralyn. If now and then she flinched a little from telling us, or telling me, the truth about herself, I am sure she never flinched for facing the truth where it most, after all, matters- in her conscience of consciousness.