The Book
This was my favorite book of all.
My mother bought this big boy home around 1998 from her job. It was one of my constant companions through late night reading sessions, attempting to grasp concepts that I didn’t understand. There are still quotes written on the inside cover, barely there in pencil and pressed flowers from an event I can’t recall hidden in its pages.
She still jokes that I used to read the dictionary. I was pursuing language at the time. Trying to grasp it. Eager to know as many words as possible. I’d flip through it sometimes, land on a word that I’d never seen, flip through to look up another word that was in the definition, get caught on a word at the corner of the page. I’d write it down so I’d remember it later.
In recent years I found the internet more convenient (google define:dictionary) but I miss that immediate discovery. Reading with a dictionary on hand. I hate to read near a computer as it becomes and endless hole of distraction: dictionary.com becomes gmail, becomes flickr, becomes twitter, becomes facebook becomes two hours later and I’ve not progressed a page. What’s lost are all the words that are skipped over, meant to be came back to, but of course forgotten. I’m reading more but I don’t feel like my grasp of the language is growing.
Anne Sexton….
My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget how one word is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
something I might have said…
but did not.
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