the smell

Going in the big room to open up the window, I am knocked back by the smell. What did Pop do. Did he varnish the wood-panelled walls? When I opened the window, I think I figured it out. It opens much more easily now. WD-40. Though, it seems like such a powerful smell for what I assume must of been a rather small dose.

The Artful Sentence

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time.

-- Jhumpa Lahiri at The New York Times

I empathize. I sometimes feel as though my true art-object is not the poem or the novel, but the artfully crafted sentence or three. That is why I post a lot of quotes, which is for me a sort of collection of favored sentences.

Indeed, when I am feeling most brain-dead, as though I cannot have more that a couple of dozen brain cells firing up when I am trying to think, I sometimes consider reducing my blog to captured sentences, the way a butterfly collector catches butterflies, and I would only supply a few sentences of my own in order to give readers a context, so that the isolated sentences are not deprived of their force.

Writing this out, I feel the temptation acutely. It would make for a simpler blogging strategy: just collecting sentences from my reading and posting them, along with images that I come across and which capture my fancy. Maybe later, when absolutely all the fun has seeped away from this increasingly doleful enterprise. I suppose I am pretty close to doing this anyway.