News of the recent passing of Bennett Lamond, one of my favourite and best English Lit professors, in combination with a particularly inspiring weekend full of theatre, spoken word, impulse book buying, and intense reading, caused me to think about the combinations of words that stick. All the snippets of literature that go floating through my head regularly. I always supposed they weren’t necessarily the most significant ones – I have a terrible brain for memorisation that doesn’t involve music, even of things I love – but then I also have to wonder why it is they’ve stuck if they’re not.
Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he said
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun
God damn it, you’ve got to be kind
Many of these things, aside from Gatsby, I couldn’t tell you in detail about why I loved them to start with. Or exactly what happens in the course of the story. Or even what all the characters names are. I need to read it all again. But you don’t need a perfect memory to know a thing meant something. Was important. Is important. And when I read it again it will no doubt grow in that.
April is the cruelest month
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds
Olives and wax
The parts that make a whole. Or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Whatever you subscribe to. All of these things planted themselves in college or before. I’ve surely done at least as much or more reading in the decade since I was an undergraduate than I had in the ten years before, but there are no lines from this more recent time that chum me to work in the morning or pop into my head while I shower.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree
Something rotten in the state of Denmark
Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair! Nothing beside remains
If you look at pictures of me from high school and pictures of me today, you’d barely know the difference aside from a few grey hairs. I am always jeans and a t-shirt and trainers, even when I wear nice vintage dresses. My dance shoes are flat, and when my dress shoes are not, I feel more fake than fancy. I prefer to be as close to the ground as nature intended, which is still pretty far.
Harry Potter is important to me but not a single passage sticks with me in the way the first word of Beowulf or the last few lines of Ozymandias do. The way we prepare to tell all great stories and the way all things must end.
Hwæt. (So.)
So we beat on
So it goes
