... Learning, always learning ...
February 16, 1999
4:30 a.m.
Lisa gave me Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass for Valentine's Day this year. I've got to admit that I've rarely read much poetry, but I sat down and thumbed through some of it Sunday afternoon in the spaces between commercials of the University of Louisville basketball game. (The Cards totally demolished Georgia Tech in what may have been their best game of the year). I thought the book was interesting, but I never quite got into it at that point. But after the game, I found a few quiet moments to settle into it. I picked through the pages, letting my eyes fall on various passages and allowing them to suck me in. I've always been a spot reader, one of those types that reads from the back of a magazine to the front. Sometimes I got lost in the passages, I'll admit. That's the way of poetry and me. I miss the nuances that generally make it sing for other people. But this time it was quiet, and I just read through it, letting the words bounce through my head. I started "Song of Myself," and suddenly fifteen or twenty minutes had passed and I felt the words and the phrases rubbing against the hollows of my mind. After dinner, I read some of C.S. Lewis's Narnia series to Brigid for her bedtime story. And in the reading, I caught rhythm in the sentence structure that maybe I hadn't caught before. (Brigid's been reading the Narnia stuff for the past couple weeks, and I think we're on book four or five of the series). Then I went to bed myself and read more of Whitman. Lisa went to sleep before I did, something that rarely happens. I read a little further, still occasionally unsure of specific meaning, but feeling a deeper truth to the words at the level of the marrow inside my bones. Finally, I was too tired to read any more. I put the book down, feeling a weight lift from my body I drew my fingers reluctantly away. I turned out the light and closed my eyes. Lisa's breathing beside me was the shallow echo of ocean waves, the wind through wooded leaves. The blanket lay over me like a warm night. I smiled to myself, then went to sleep.   Have a productive day.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries, often begins her writing day by reading from the dictionary. She picks a page at random and spends the next five minutes reading every word. Shields does this not to find a word to use but to immerse herself in language. It centers her, and slows her down so she can write." Naomi Epel "the Observation Deck" |
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