Sitting in my chair with a book on my lap, It’s Marie Howe’s '‘ WHAT THE LIVING DO” a book of poems. These I can read over and over.. I can read an essay or two if they don’t keep going for pages and pages..But I can no longer read anything else from cover to cover. No matter how good it is. I read maybe a paragraph, look down at all the pages still to come, each one covered with words, and just lose heart. I suppose it has something to do with age. A lot of my friends are listening to books on tape. I’m afraid to try that. I have very few actual thoughts so I need to be around when one of them arrives. If I were listening to Moby Dick, I might not have room to squeeze in a single thought of my own. But I decided I would try to re-read Lawrence Durrell’s “Prospero’s Cell.” There is a sentence in it I have remembered for fifty years: “The taste of olives is as old as the taste of cold water.”
It had taken me a long time to like Lawrence Durrell, brother of Gerald, who wrote “My Family And Other Animals,” a book about living on Corfu as a kid, and is one of the most interesting and hilarious books in the world. Lawrence sounded a little haughty, and irritatingly intellectual, in his brother’s book. I remember at one point he opens a box of matches and out pops the scorpion his brother Gerald was keeping under observation.. “Every matchbox a death trap!” Lawrence exclaims. But then I read a collection of letters written between Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller and decided to give him a chance. Back then, any friend of Miller’s was a friend of mine. So I read the four books of The Alexandrian Quartet, which were all above my head, but I remember liking the last one. This morning I took down my old copy of “Prospero’s Cell” and started to read. I read the first sentence, and closed the book. “Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu, the blue really begins.” Oh my god. I didn’t want to read another word, I just wanted to live with that sentence in my head f\orever, so beautiful it was. So now I collect first sentneces.
Yes, what Wendy Varley said, and gosh, I love that volume of poetry by Marie Howe. I've been reading it for a very long time. And the Durrell Bros. Each with different gifts and types of brilliance. I can't imagine not reading, it would be a heartbreak. I have wondered about audio books, but I feel I would fail at that...I seem to have an issue with listening and integrating. I love not only the words I discover while reading, but the shape of each letter, the visual beauty of words in type, the fonts chosen by the book designers. So much to miss. And the special snippets that anchor themselves in our brains for decades. I love you, Abby.
First sentences are portals.