"I know, and that's OK," said aeth in response to my confession.
It's good to have friends who understand you.
Anyway, I dug out the Led Zep the other day when searching for music to read/edit by. I know some people can't read, or write, or do other focused word-related tasks while listening to music with lyrics, but for me a familiar soundtrack is better than silence and miles better than other kinds of background noise. In some ways it's like the stationary equivalent of thinking while moving for me. It's a net that catches my attention when it tries to wander, so I don't go all Nicolas-Cage-in-Adaptation -- my mind just bounces from what I should be thinking about to the music, and back.
What I re-realized this week: Led Zeppelin is still good, and I'm way not cool enough to be in one of johnny's books.
MEANWHILE, MOONVINE SHARED a paean to the word lugubrious and I was separately reminded of the saying about this diary's title being the most beautiful phrase in the English language.
Which brings me to Kate Atkinson, and this excerpt from One Good Turn:
He checked his watch. Four o'clock—teatime on Planet Julia. He remembered a warm, lazy afternoon they had spent together last summer in the Orchard Tea Rooms at Grantchester, the two of them stretched out on deck chairs beneath the trees, replete with afternoon tea. They had been on a brief, rather uncomfortable visit to Julia's sister, who still lived in Cambridge and who had declined to join them on their "jaunt." Julia's word. Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words—"spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers"—that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you to get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.I could probably come up with a similar list (Autumn equinox is a good one -- put that on my list), but if pressed to pick just one word -- and I've noted often that I'm incapable of picking favorites -- I think it would have to be "profusely." There are, in my experience, very few things one can really be said to do profusely. Bleed, mainly, in the strict etymological sense of pouring forth. Or apologize. Not generally positive things -- I suppose you can have a profusion of flowers, but I don't think that flowers, themselves, can do anything profusely."Afternoon tea" itself, of course, was one of Julia's all-time favorite phrases ("Good enough words on their own, but together, perfect"). "Afternoon tea" usually trailed a few excessive adjectives in its wake—"scrumptious," "yummy," "heavenly."
"Warm bakery basket" was another of her favorites, as were (mysteriously) "Autumn equinox" and "lamp black." Certain words, she said, made her toes "positively curl with happiness"—"rum," "vulgar," "blanchisserie," "hazard," "perfidious," "treasure," "divertimenti." Certain scraps and lines of poetry—"Of his bones are coral made" and "They flee from me that sometime did me seek"—sent her into sentimental rapture.
I have this clear memory, though, of a paperback of Man and his Symbols I read for class in high school, and the simple note on the cover: "Profusely illustrated." Strangely, I have no recollection of the illustrations themselves -- absolutely none -- but the phrase itself, "profusely illustrated," settled itself somewhere deep in my psyche and, from time to time, the adverb still rises to the surface, but does not quite overflow.
I cannot pick one perfect line of poetry, sorry. This is the way the diary ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
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