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February 1, 2009

The Spirit of the Age

I've endeavored these days to read a book a week, to dress myself in the morning in words and phrases and let their impressions sink in throughout the day. Quality has overtaken quantity of late (that's the sheen I'll put on it, at least), as I've turned my way through the three centuries of Woolf's Orlando and forced myself to resist telephoning friends and reciting entire passages aloud. I'll resist that urge here, too, save for the following paragraph which seemed in its simplicity to echo the intentions of so many of my friends in their work, and of my own as well, although in a different way:

"For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion."

And now I'll leave my own space here, until sometime after midnight tonight...

Posted by David Lowery at February 1, 2009 2:30 PM