random literary musings
Something that I almost always do with a new book, before I've bought
it or at least before I actually settle down and start reading it, is
flip through it and randomly read snippets of it. To satisfy my
initial curiosity whenever I find a new book. To get a feel for
the writer's style - I particularly watch for clarity and grace.
Phrasing, phrasing, phrasing. If I don't like your phrasing, I
will not read your writing unless I am flat-out required to, and I will
do so under protest. I will whine and pout and wince and grouse,
because I can be ridiculously anal-retentive about my reading
preferences when I want to be.
We'll just ignore that my own writing likely does not live up to my own usual expectations. Heh. I try, but I usually do not succeed, and I do sincerely apologize for that, because hey, I know how painful it can be. ;)
But I digress. I flip through new books, as explained above. I'll read a couple sentences, a paragraph, sometimes even a whole page. If I'm doing this before I've actually bought the book, if I come across enough snippets that catch my attention in a good way, I'll generally buy the book - or at least put it on a list of books that I want. When I've already bought it but haven't read it yet, it just gets me that much more excited to read the book. I honestly get a rush when I find snippets that just grab my attention.
My point in making this entry is to do the following: share a few of those rush-inducing snippets. Some from books I have read, some from books that are still on my Need To Read list. And if any of you feel like it, I invite you to share one or two of your own. :)
The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die.
from Anthropology Of An American Girl by H. T. Hamann
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Baron - who I was beginning to realize was something of a nervous man - leaned over to scratch at a mark on the surface of Mameha's table, and made me think of my father on the last day I'd seen him, digging grime out of ruts in the wood with his fingernails. I wondered what he would think if he could see me kneeling here in Mameha's apartment, wearing a robe more expensive than anything he'd ever laid eyes on, with a baron across from me and one of the most famous geisha in all of Japan at my side. I was hardly worthy of these surroundings. And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his desk, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk, there were empty bottles - rows and rows of them we had collected for our future ship-building. In the closet were more ships - the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over after years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death.
He smashed that one first.
My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched him as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottles, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed - a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven.
from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
And finally, from what is likely one of the most beautiful books I've ever read, one that I've lost count of how many times I've read it:
The sky is flesh.
The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends down behind the line of the horizon. It's a sight that has exhausted its magnificence for me over the years, but now I seem to be seeing it for the first time.
More and more now, I remember things. Images, my life, the sky. Sometimes I remember the life I used to live, and it feels impossibly far away. It's always there, a part of me, in the back of my mind, but it doesn't seem real. Whether life is more real than death, I don't know. What I know is that the life I've lived since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before.
I know this: I risked my life without living it. Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it. I had already been flying for a long time when he said that. It was 1937. I was thirty-nine. I was more beautiful than ever, but an aura of unhappiness traveled with me, like the trail of a falling comet. I felt as though I had already lived my entire life, having flown the Atlantic and set several world records, and there was no one to share my sadness with, least of all my husband. Charmed by my style and my daring exploits, the public continued to send me flowers and gifts, but the love of strangers meant nothing to me. My luminous existence left me longing and bored. I had no idea what it meant to live and entire life. I was still very young.
So, the sky.
It's the only sky that I can remember, the only one that speaks to me now.
I'm flying around the world, there's nothing but sky.
The sky is flesh. It's the last sky.
I remember: I'm flying around the world. I'm flying over the Pacific somewhere off the coast of New Guinea in my twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and I'm lost. I watch the sky as it curves and swells, and every now and then I think I can see it shudder. Voluptuous, sultry in the naked heat, it seems to me to be the flesh of a woman. But then suddenly the light illuminates a stretch of more masculine proportions - a muscular passage of azure heft, a wide plank like the back of a hand - and I have to acknowledge, although I hate to admit it, the bisexuality of nature. I purse my lips a little when I realize this, and scrunch my nose up to rearrange my goggles. My eyes and my eyes reflected in the windshield hold the sun in them, and it burns. I blink and reach one arm directly overhead. My fingers grasp a dial. Out of the far corner of my field of vision, I catch a glimpse of the underlying sea. Thinking to myself that this might be the last day of my life, that I'm hot, and that I am hungry, I adjust the dial and lower my arm. The sea is dark. It is darker than the sky.
This is the story of what happened to me when I died. It's also the story of my life. Destiny, the alchemy of fate and luck. I think about it sometimes, under a radiant sun. The tide laughs. The light swims. I watch the fish-skeleton shadows of the palm leaves on the sand. The clouds ripped to shreds.
Today when I think of my former life, I think of it as a dream. In the dream I am another person. In the dream I am the most famous aviatrix of my day, a heroine. I am Amelia Earhart.
from I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn
I'm doing better than I was on Saturday. Thank you to all of you who replied to that entry; I really appreciated all of your words. :)
I've been drinking Chai Latte for the past hour or so, and it's so tasty. Like liquid pumpkin pie. Makes me think of Thanksgiving. I can't wait for Thanksgiving. Mmm.
I hope everyone is doing well. Much love to all of you.
We'll just ignore that my own writing likely does not live up to my own usual expectations. Heh. I try, but I usually do not succeed, and I do sincerely apologize for that, because hey, I know how painful it can be. ;)
But I digress. I flip through new books, as explained above. I'll read a couple sentences, a paragraph, sometimes even a whole page. If I'm doing this before I've actually bought the book, if I come across enough snippets that catch my attention in a good way, I'll generally buy the book - or at least put it on a list of books that I want. When I've already bought it but haven't read it yet, it just gets me that much more excited to read the book. I honestly get a rush when I find snippets that just grab my attention.
My point in making this entry is to do the following: share a few of those rush-inducing snippets. Some from books I have read, some from books that are still on my Need To Read list. And if any of you feel like it, I invite you to share one or two of your own. :)
The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die.
from Anthropology Of An American Girl by H. T. Hamann
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Baron - who I was beginning to realize was something of a nervous man - leaned over to scratch at a mark on the surface of Mameha's table, and made me think of my father on the last day I'd seen him, digging grime out of ruts in the wood with his fingernails. I wondered what he would think if he could see me kneeling here in Mameha's apartment, wearing a robe more expensive than anything he'd ever laid eyes on, with a baron across from me and one of the most famous geisha in all of Japan at my side. I was hardly worthy of these surroundings. And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his desk, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk, there were empty bottles - rows and rows of them we had collected for our future ship-building. In the closet were more ships - the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over after years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death.
He smashed that one first.
My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched him as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottles, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed - a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven.
from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
And finally, from what is likely one of the most beautiful books I've ever read, one that I've lost count of how many times I've read it:
The sky is flesh.
The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends down behind the line of the horizon. It's a sight that has exhausted its magnificence for me over the years, but now I seem to be seeing it for the first time.
More and more now, I remember things. Images, my life, the sky. Sometimes I remember the life I used to live, and it feels impossibly far away. It's always there, a part of me, in the back of my mind, but it doesn't seem real. Whether life is more real than death, I don't know. What I know is that the life I've lived since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before.
I know this: I risked my life without living it. Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it. I had already been flying for a long time when he said that. It was 1937. I was thirty-nine. I was more beautiful than ever, but an aura of unhappiness traveled with me, like the trail of a falling comet. I felt as though I had already lived my entire life, having flown the Atlantic and set several world records, and there was no one to share my sadness with, least of all my husband. Charmed by my style and my daring exploits, the public continued to send me flowers and gifts, but the love of strangers meant nothing to me. My luminous existence left me longing and bored. I had no idea what it meant to live and entire life. I was still very young.
So, the sky.
It's the only sky that I can remember, the only one that speaks to me now.
I'm flying around the world, there's nothing but sky.
The sky is flesh. It's the last sky.
I remember: I'm flying around the world. I'm flying over the Pacific somewhere off the coast of New Guinea in my twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and I'm lost. I watch the sky as it curves and swells, and every now and then I think I can see it shudder. Voluptuous, sultry in the naked heat, it seems to me to be the flesh of a woman. But then suddenly the light illuminates a stretch of more masculine proportions - a muscular passage of azure heft, a wide plank like the back of a hand - and I have to acknowledge, although I hate to admit it, the bisexuality of nature. I purse my lips a little when I realize this, and scrunch my nose up to rearrange my goggles. My eyes and my eyes reflected in the windshield hold the sun in them, and it burns. I blink and reach one arm directly overhead. My fingers grasp a dial. Out of the far corner of my field of vision, I catch a glimpse of the underlying sea. Thinking to myself that this might be the last day of my life, that I'm hot, and that I am hungry, I adjust the dial and lower my arm. The sea is dark. It is darker than the sky.
This is the story of what happened to me when I died. It's also the story of my life. Destiny, the alchemy of fate and luck. I think about it sometimes, under a radiant sun. The tide laughs. The light swims. I watch the fish-skeleton shadows of the palm leaves on the sand. The clouds ripped to shreds.
Today when I think of my former life, I think of it as a dream. In the dream I am another person. In the dream I am the most famous aviatrix of my day, a heroine. I am Amelia Earhart.
from I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn
I'm doing better than I was on Saturday. Thank you to all of you who replied to that entry; I really appreciated all of your words. :)
I've been drinking Chai Latte for the past hour or so, and it's so tasty. Like liquid pumpkin pie. Makes me think of Thanksgiving. I can't wait for Thanksgiving. Mmm.
I hope everyone is doing well. Much love to all of you.