My frequent Mockingbird at the Movies posts may belie my love of reading. I know many Mockingbird readers are big consumers of the written word, and so I thought I would try something. In the film adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, Michael Douglas, a writer, says of his lover, “She was a junkie for the printed word. Lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.” So, what is your favorite non-Biblical English-language passage of reasonable length…your drug of choice? Mine comes from Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and it is the final paragraph of the novel. For a bit of context, the novel’s narrator has just experienced the summer in which he feels he has grown up:
When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness — and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.
In the comments, post your favorite passage, with a bit of context as necessary. I can’t wait to read them.
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15 responses to “The Wonderful Written Word”
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For fear of breaching copyright I'll just allude to Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, early in the book, where he explains that what would become NASA was casting about for test pilots and the test pilots came from the armed forces. He then proceeds to explain that a fighter pilot would rather punch a multi-million dollar hole in the ground than admit he made a stupid mistake and these were the young egotistical horndogs on whom America was staking the future of the space race. He wasn't writing about our capacity to sin, self-justify, and defend ourselves to the bitter end but he might as well have been! Plus the book is hilarious from start to finish.
The meeting between the Bishop of Digne and Jean Valjean in the first book of Hugo's Les Miserables. Classic example of Christ-like mercy, forgiveness, and grace. If one has the time (a long time, mind you), a reading of Les Mis is a must. One of the best pieces of literature ever produced.
Where to begin? There are so many delicious passages. But this one recently captured me… again…
"Life in the barn was very good – night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything."
– Charlotte's Web, E.B. White
Also, the ending of Brideshead Revisited, the prologue to The Prince of Tides, and almost every single word of To Kill A Mockingbird.
at the end of a cookbook recipe for baking a chocolate cake: "serves 12. For someone who´s heart has been broken: serves 1."
John F Kennedy: "I said 'carpe diem' not "kill diem"!
and for those who can read Latin, the motto on my Norwegian family crest:
"Semper ubi sub ubi"
I agree that To Kill a Mockingbird is wonderful. I also love Zossima's observation that many people who ardently profess to lvoe humanity can actually hate everyone they know (big Dostoevsky fan so I couldn't NOT eventually put in a little bit from him here)
Wenatchee – I adore The Right Stuff…I can't imagine we'd be in violation of copyright by quoting a few lines…can't you post it? And Blair, your passage from Les Miserables? I'd love to read them again!
Wenatchee, your reference to Zossima's observation (about misanthropic "humanitarians") reminded me of one of my favorite passages from The Screwtape Letters:
"Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus become wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
Margaret and WTH… the problem of Misanthropic Humanitarians was well captured in the song "Easy To Be Hard" from the musical HAIR:
How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no
Especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend
The whole of The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. The beginning and the end are here:
Beginning:
Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, "I am running away."
"If you run away, I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.
Ending
"Shucks," said the bunny, "I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.
And so he did.
"Have a carrot," said the mother bunny.
Anything by Evelyn Waugh, but especially the Travel Writings or the passages in Sword of Honor with Col Ritchie-Hook and biffing.
StampDawg… wow. This is eerie. A few months ago, I posted that Screwtape quote WITIH a YouTube video of "Easy to Be Hard" on my FB page… I've been thinking about how they complement each other perfectly for a long, long time.
Well, Margaret, Mockingbird lives halfway in The Twilight Zone. So eerie things are to be expected.
Thanks to Margaret for quoting from Charlotte's Web, surely one of the great novels of the last 100 years, written by the man (EB White) who taught so many people how to write.
In keeping with Nick's elegy to the written word, I'll mention that the extraordinary passion and music of KING LEAR is hard to beat. The amazing thing is that it's literally on every page — it's like one long song. Here's a few passages I love:
No, I'll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?
Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
But I am bound upon a wheel of fire
That my tears do scald like molten lead
Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies.
Bonnie-thanks for that…in tears just reading it again. my heart says "shucks" twice a day.
One of many powerful and insightful quote from J. Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" –
"Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last–only at the very last. But the wilderness found him out early, and had taken vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude–and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core."
the part in Slaughterhouse 5 where Billy Pilgrim watches a war movie in reverse. Vonnegut had a way of generating insane energy in the reader while exerting none himself.