Heart Traces
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Adam Gopnik's "Man of Fetters: Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale" (Dec. 8 issue of New Yorker) is a work of Gopnik-caliber art, jam-packed with the curious, the rending, and the infinitely quotable.
Take the following truism, for example. Every famous man gets reduced to a single word: Darwin is evolution, Wilde is wit, Mill is liberty, and Johnson is his dictionary. I read it several times. I stopped. I pondered. If I were famous what would I hope my reduction word would be? I came up with absolutely nothing while managing painfully to recall many one-word zingers that have in the past been tossed at me.
But what I really love, what will go inside my book of words and quotes, is Gopnik's final, singing line:
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
8 comments:
The first word that comes to mind when I think of you is "graceful." Your writing, your photography, your descriptions of dance, your replies to us commenters here on your blog. Full of grace.
B&BM: You are too much. Graceful. I thank you. I think I was so stopped by that line of Gopnik's because once I was riding on a train with a fellow writer. We had been honored by a similar award and were traveling from New York back to Philadelphia. He was very nice. We became friends. And then one day he told me how he would classify my writing, which was, in one word, "sentimental." And I have never honestly overcome that moment in my own head. Sentimental.
I like graceful far better. I'm not famous, of course. I don't worry about that sort of legacy. But I want to do right by words.
Oh, my heavens! That comment reminds me of a former professor who told me not to read Plath because her work was "merely a specialized form of hysteria."
And I think, too, of another woman poet (whose work I think you just discovered) who was told she was being "sentimental" for writing about the tremendous psychic transformations of motherhood . . .
I just spoke to my roommate yesterday about how I never want to be limited to one word.
that quote is so beautiful!
I would have to say my word for you is heart. Both your passion for writing and for affecting change and because I suspect that you leave traces of your heart on every page that you fill with words.
And I am going to put that last quote in my word book, too. It's such a great one! Thanks for sharing.
Liviana: You will never be reduced to one word, I promise. You are so brightly and broadly hued.
Amy and Em — to have written this quote into such a long and well researched story.... To have the power, at the end: I have enormous respect for Mr. Gopnik.
Em: I need that heart this morning. Thank you.
That last line is gorgeous!
The one-word handle is just too much - it hurts my head. I would bet that no one ever is happy with the word they are assigned. (I'd lay $10 that Johnson would take offense at the "dictionary" label, preferring something more along the lines of "endowed.")
Just a hunch.
:^) Anna
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