cobbled parts
In a beginning, six legs strolled under the light of a full-ish moon. Two ankles, bitten by frost, complained bitterly at the twolegs for her choice of cropped socks. Shushing the ankle’s grumbles… Toughen up, will you?… the walker noticed that she and her companion were casting magnificent shadows onto the asphalt.
Once home she raced inside to retrieve her phone — so that she could snap a picture. You see, while strolling, the wonderer amused herself, and quieted her ankles, by staging a sentence. She’s recently started reading Chocolat by Joanne Harris, whose language is flowery and descriptive in an inspiring way. She writes sentences like:
Paint and sunlight and soapy water will rid it of the grime, but the sadness is another matter, the forlorn resonance of a house where no one has laughed for years.
and…
A slight air of embarrassment prevails, of abashment at this excess of noise and color.
and…
Reynaud gave a tight, sour smile, as if his first glimpse of my daughter confirmed every one of his suspicions about me.
Not at all the walking, wanderer’s personal writing style… and yet, like a child, she is called to play with it.
Earlier in the week an inspirational quote from Hunter S. Thompson, an author who refused to be bound by any conventions, floated on angel’s wings through her inbox. The journalist was not one for complacency. He said…
Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.
Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.
Huh.
Oh! The sentence about the moon… I’ve forgotten what I carried home and… failed to make a note of it.
That’s okay.
It was the experience of cobbling the words that mattered, not so much the words themselves.
Happy Tuesday!
Thoughts, tarnished by time, rushed into full awareness. With fingers bitten by frost he used his Canonet QL17 Rangefinder camera to capture vivid wilderness scenes.
See what you made me do! Back when “digital” meant “Of, or like, digits” or referred to the fingers on our hands, cameras were loaded with film. And sometimes protested the cold like someone’s ankles recently. During a winter backpacking trip I kept the camera tucked inside layers of garments to guard against slowed shutters or brittle film that refused to wind. When needed, time outside the garment womb was kept to a minimum for critical shots. I also learned that the cold camera could quickly condense body moisture once back inside. So it had to remain there a good while to give up its condensation.
The ethereal image quality of your shadows on the asphalt was a nice lead to your newsletter today. The “worth a thousand words” easily comes to mind, and what followed came close! As I entered young adulthood (and sometimes still there on any given day) my view of writers was basically that those who babbled on in polysyllabic fashion were “the” writers and the best avoided the pitfalls of excess emotion.
Today? Not so much. I once read a critic commenting on Ernest Hemingway’s approach in his early days. That EH would sometimes labor for hours, even days, to craft five or six one or two syllable words into a sentence with the profound, exact impact on his readers that he sought. Using that approach, The Encyclopedia Brittanica might have become one volume covering everything from A-Z!
And my point? There is a point: the kaleidoscope of ideas and words and images today registered like a Christmas present for me. Sorry for my lump of coal in your stocking…