Archive for the ‘Memorable Lines’ Category
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
“One holds the knife as one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip – by the stem. Not palmed nor gripped nor grasped, but lightly, with the tips of the fingers. The knife is not for pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin. Like a slender fish, it waits, at the ready, then, go! It darts, followed by a fine wake of red. The flesh parts, falling away to yellow globules of fat. Even now, after so many times, I still marvel at its power – cold, gleaming, silent. More, I am still struck with a kind of dread that it is I in whose hand the blade travels, that my hand is its vehicle, that yet again this terrible steel-bellied thing and I have conspired for a most unnatural purpose, the laying open of the body of a human being.”
From “The Knife,” by Richard Selzer
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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Sunday, June 7th, 2009
“One is in a hurry to leave, but one’s visitor keeps chattering away. If it is someone of no importance, one can get rid of him by saying, “You must tell me all about it next time”; but, should it be the sort of visitor whose presence commands one’s best behaviour, the situation is hateful indeed.
One finds that a hair has got caught in the stone which one is rubbing one’s inkstick, or again that gravel is lodged in the inkstick, making a nasty, grating sound.
…One is just about to be told some interesting piece of news when a baby starts crying.
…One has gone to bed and is about to doze off when a mosquito appears, announcing himself in a reedy voice. One can actually feel the wind made by his wings and, slight though it is, one finds it hateful in the extreme.”
from “Hateful Things” by Sei Shonagon
Sei Shonagon
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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Monday, June 1st, 2009
He always feels hot. I always feel cold. In the summer when it really is hot he does nothing but complain about how hot he feels. He is irritated if he sees me put a jumper on in the evening.
He speaks several languages well; I do not speak any well. He manages – in his own way – to speak even the languages that he doesn’t know.
He has an excellent sense of direction. I have none at all. After one day in a foreign city he can move about in it as thoughtlessly as a butterfly. I get lost in my own city; I have to ask directions so that I can get back home again. He hates asking directions; when we go by car to a town we don’t know he doesn’t want to ask directions and tells me to look at the map. I don’t know how to read maps and I get confused by all the little red circles and he loses his temper.
Natalia Ginzburg, from “He and I,” an essay about marriage.
Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) – essayist, novelist, activist. Of her writing, she said:
“When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn’t matter much to me. Only, I don’t want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked ‘a small writer like who?’ it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me; however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life.”
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
I’m trying to remember my introduction to the personal essay. I think it was in high school and I think it was Orwell. But I could be wrong. I might be misremembering. And somehow, my confusion about this seems fitting – considering that essays tend (and are designed) to sneak up on a reader unawares, to insinuate rather than insist.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s say it was Orwell. ”Why I Write,” (for yes, I wanted to write), or maybe “Shooting an Elephant,” (for I had a soft spot for animals and my political ideals were distinctly left-wing).
Whichever one I started with, I quickly read the others. Here was the voice of an intelligent someone, talking - so it seemed - directly to me. At the time, I felt much in need of intelligent conversation, but like many girls of my generation (or maybe any generation) I felt a certain pressure to disguise the need. It wasn’t “cool” to be interested in ideas. So the fact that this conversation was silent and could be carried on at home in private was a virtue, as far as I was concerned.
From Orwell, I swam the channel to Camus. From Camus to Colette, to a rusty-red book of sketches about her mother, Sidonie, and her early years with that wily monster, “Willy,” that I picked up in a second-hand shop.
Soon, I began working in a book store myself, the old Reader’s Den on Bloor Street in Toronto. Here were riches never before imagined. The pay was lousy, but the perks were great - the colleagues, with whom I could be myself instead of someone else, the view of Philosopher’s Walk from the plate windows, the sometimes eccentric and always interesting customers and the drama when one would try to filch the stock.
And the books, of course. The books. In spring and fall, sales reps would come with their catalogues. We’d cluster round them, salivating about the season ahead. When the boxes arrived we’d go through them like kids at Christmas, plucking favoured volumes and placing them on a shelf “to be bought” in the crowded staff room. Half our pay or more regularly went to books.
When business was slow I used to leaf through the New York Review of Books. There, I read long review essays about books that put them into context. There, I was introduced to Oliver Sacks. There I read Sontag, and from Sontag I stepped sideways to Berger and backwards to Benjamin. I read Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. Adrienne Rich. Richard Rodriguez. Alice Walker. Cyril Connolly. Virginia Woolf. Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher. And more. From book to book I leapt, learning something, I hope, from each, and always attracted by that speaking, remembering voice, by a writer who was writing to think and to understand.
Sometimes when we’ve read something and loved it, we imagine that everyone in the world must already know it, too. But that isn’t true, and maybe it’s especially untrue about essays, since so few people read the genre. So it occurred to me that I might share some of my favourites. In the weeks ahead I will quote from well-loved essays. Snippets to whet the appetite and spark the mind.
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Memorable Lines
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