A quiet place.
I am an invisible man.
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
*****
Last week I pulled this book from a friend’s shelf and began reading. Great opening line, I thought, but why don’t I remember it? After I’d read a couple of pages I realised the book was not what I thought it was, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, which I listened to in the car recently. I’ve now read many more pages and am happy to have accidentally discovered this story.
Ailsa has thrown out a challenge to find a photo with the theme of time, and the Weekly Photo Challenge asks us to think ‘future tense’. Today my husband and I went to a new place called the Arboretum, born out of fires which burnt much of western Canberra ten years ago. To replace what we no longer have and to help the city recover, especially those who lost all their possessions in the fires, 250 hectares have been planted with large numbers of rare or endangered trees. There are numerous stands of trees to walk and play in, outdoor entertainment areas, lookouts and hilltop sculptures. This word sculpture had me reflecting on time, 105 years of it.
Core of my heart
The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins —
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies…
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror —
The wide brown land for me!
Dorothea Mackellar published this poem in 1908, four years after she wrote it at the age of 19. It’s now such an Australian icon that its lines frequently appear in news articles and tourism literature. One in particular is well-known: ‘I love a sunburnt country’. But during years of drought, of which we have many, the phrase ‘wide brown land’ is invoked. Now Dorothea’s words are immortalised in a huge steel sculpture in the form of her handwriting from the manuscript held in the State Library of New South Wales. The sculptors were Marcus Tatton, Futago and Chris Viney.
Imagine writing something (at 19!) that would be sculpted a hundred or so years later and placed high on a hill in a capital city. The words are part of Dorothea’s future, and the Arboretum is part of Canberra’s future.
PS These are phone photos, taken with a Samsung in the spirit of phoneography month.
The verb ‘to read’ does not tolerate the imperative, an aversion it shares with a few others: ‘to love’ … ‘to dream’ …
Like a Novel (originally Comme un roman), Daniel Pennac (my translation)
*****
I’ve read this book in French. On the back cover is a list of ten rights of a reader, which I found online in the printable form of an English language poster, and which I duly printed and stuck to the back of a particular door for everyone to read.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
*****
In my younger and more vulnerable years I went alone to see Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby. It was slow and misty but dramatic enough. I’ve never heard the song ‘What’ll I do?’ without returning in my mind to that movie theatre.
There was once a sly old fox with nine tails, who was very curious to know whether his wife was true to him: so he stretched himself out under a bench, and pretended to be dead as a mouse.
Mrs Fox, Brothers Grimm (Trans. unknown)
*****
I’m presently translating a few fairy tales and for inspiration have been going through a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. When I read this opening line I laughed and read it again.
I’ve found another version of the story entitled How Mrs Fox Married Again, which gives more of a clue about the plot than the simpler Mrs Fox.
Illustration by Walter Crane, found in Project Gutenberg.
When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug.
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (Trans. by Stanley Appelbaum)
*****
Sometimes I have to read a piece of literature in order to teach it. This one for example. I’d avoided Metamorphosis all my life until the day a student emailed to ask for help writing an essay on it. We agreed to meet a week later, to give me time to read it. Which I did, feeling again the long flying cockroaches of my childhood scratching their way across my bare feet or arms. At the end of the week I received another email from her, from the other side of the world. She had left the country, written her essay without my help, then emailed me to say ‘Forget it’. Too late, I’d read it, I’d squirmed my way to the end.
But one good thing came out of the exercise: I discovered its great opening line.
Ailsa has posted the most awesome green photos, and I’m guessing that since she’s Irish she must have St Patrick’s Day in mind, coming up on 17th March. And so I have a King Parrot in mind: the orange and the green.
He used to visit us on our back deck. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven which I blogged about yesterday, the King Parrot never came rapping or tapping at my chamber door, nor at my window lattice. But he would fly in under the pergola and sit on the clothes horse as though wanting to join us for morning tea.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore –
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping – rapping at my chamber door.
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
*****
Today I’m working on a translation of a story in which a raven stands guard in a widow’s window, terrifying passers-by. As I search for the right words to interpret the story, the lines of Poe’s The Raven go round and round in my head.
Gustave Doré created the image in my header. It’s his interpretation of Poe’s lines.
This and more of Doré’s illustrations for The Raven are available here.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
*****
Some books have a title that tempts me to turn to the blurb; this is one of them. And then, even better, it has this great opening line. So I began reading. About half-way through I put the book down. It lost me.
Define the colour red without using the words ‘colour’ or ‘red’ in your answer, and without making reference to any other colours.
The Life of Brian (Or Lack Thereof), Maree Spratt
*****
The first line stopped me momentarily from reading the second line. My mind filled with words in easy obedience to the command; red is my favourite.
I found it at the beginning of a short story in Award Winning Australian Writing 2009, a story I’ve used several times to provoke teenagers needing to write something creative. Brian, the protagonist, competes with contributors on Yahoo Answers, waking one morning to read this challenge.
The author, Maree Spratt, won a Young Writers Award for it; when I get my students to read this story out loud, they don’t have to act to get the tone right.
Header courtesy of http://nice-cool-pics.com/img-glamourous-red-apple-slices-4627.htm