End of Semester Favorites
I asked my creative writing students (who, damn, I’m going to miss next semester) to chose paragraphs or stanzas from pieces we read that they thought would particularly stay with them. Here are some of them:
Heather Christle, “The Whole Thing Is The Hard Part”:
you have to live where the house lands on you
what else can you do your bones are all broken
and somebody loves you who is it tell me who
loves you not as much as I do I mean I even
built you a house and found you why won’t
you live in it
Bradford Morrow, “Rivages Roses for Niels Bohr”:
Late summer, warm. A walk after dinner. I looked for Bohr at the banquet but didn’t see him among the others. Word is he’s putting final touches on his address for tomorrow. The air here along the shores is heavy as pewter and as dark. Lights of the lakeside villas and hotels twinkle and shimmer, reflected on the water. I see a couple in a small boat out on the lake. The wake that tails their craft ridges the watery face of Como like iron filings drawn behind a magnetic charge. I wonder, Are they in love, their molecular hearts thrumming hard? Someone surely should be in love in such an evocative setting as this. Yes, I must believe that they are, and that the reason they are still out there, on the flat back of this mountain lake north of Milan, is because they don’t much want to row back to shore, where they will be forced to reenter the world, the other world.
We are between wars, as I say, because we are always between wars. Between great wars and many of us know it, although this occasion, which the awful Mussolini means for us to celebrate, has nothing to do with war per se.
Richard Brautigan, “The Weather In San Francisco” (the whole thing)
John Cheever, “The Cure”:
I took the train home, but I was too tired to go to Orpheo’s and then sit through a movie. I drove from the station to the house and put the car in the garage. From there I heard the telephone dining, and I waited in the garden until the ringing had stopped. As soon as I stepped into the living room, I noticed on the wall some dirty handprints that had been made by the children before they went away. They were near the baseboard and I had to get down on my knees to kiss them.
Allegra Goodman, “La Vita Nuova”:
They ate chocolate mice at Burdick’s and then they stood in front of the Harvard Coop and listened to Peruvian musicians. They explored the cemetery, and Amanda told Nathaniel that the gravestones were dragons’ teeth. They walked down to the river and she said, “If you trace the river all the way to the beginning, you’ll find a magic cave.” They took the T to Boston and stood in line for the swan boats in the Pubic Garden. She said, “At night, these boats turn into real swans.”
Nathaniel said, “You have a great imagination.”
Alice Munro, “The Children Stay”:
This is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend may days without it. An you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get.
Raymond Carver, “What’s In Alaska?”:
“How are the kids?’ Mary asked.
“They’re fine,” Carl said and put the tube in his mouth. Jack sipped the cream soda and watched the bubbles in the pipe. They reminded him of bubbles rising from a diving helmet. He imagined a lagoon and schools of remarkable fish. Carl passed the tube.
Joellyn Powers, “Capsules”:
Roger was lonely and his hands shook when he handed her the capsules that she always swallowed dry. When his hands slid beneath her sweater later that day, she felt his fingernails against her nipples, and it was a feeling like she used to get on New Year’s, at ten years old, watching Dick Clark count down the seconds until the new year began.
Alice Munro, “Cortes Island”:
I kept having dreams now and then in which the attack, the response, the possibilities, went beyond anything life offered. And from which romance was banished. Decency as well. Our bed—Mr. Gorrie’s and mine—was the gravelly beach or the rough boat deck or the punishing coils of greasy rope. There was a relish of what you might call ugliness. His pungent smell, his jelly eye, his dog’s teeth. I woke out of these pagan dreams drained even of astonishment, or shame, and fell asleep again and woke with a memory I got used to denying in the morning. For years and years and surely long after he was dead Mr. Gorrie operated in my nightlife this way. Until I used him up, I suppose, the way we use up the dead. But it never seemed to be this way—that I was in charge, that I had brought him there. It seemed to be working both ways, as if he had brought me there, too, and it was his experience as much as it was mine
Anton Chekhov, “The Lady With the Dog”:
In this constancy of the sea, in her perfect indifference to our living and dying, there lies perhaps the promise of our eternal salvation, the unbroken stream of life on earth, and its unceasing movement forward perfection. Sitting beside the young woman, who looked so beautiful in the dawn, Gurov was soothed and enchanted by the fairylike scene—the sea and the mountains, the clouds and the broad sky. He pondered how everything in the universe, if properly understood, would be entirely beautiful, but for our own thoughts and actions when we lose sight of the higher purposes of life and our human dignity.
