The Three King's Man

I caught up on my reading over break partially out of the lost joy and partially out of desperation. It is a quiet life without midterms and compositions, even quieter with Ethan in Chicago and my sister in San Diego and my dad teaching again. I can't stay long in the house (cat allergies) so I make excuses of things to do outside - shopping, ultimate, lunch with my mom at work, sitting on the back step reading in the shade (it was 80 out). Also the trip to San Diego which I knew would be full of unbearable PDA (the non-electronic type) and the printed word was my way out. I revisit childhood favorites every time I go home - the bookshelves still two layers deep with the few favorites I bought - Elizabeth Enright, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Susan Cooper, Jane Yolen, Piers Anthony, Jean Craighead George - all my books from school, even the notebooks and my chem lab writeups from sophomore year. I lingered for a while, the only one up, listening to my father snore and the breeze lift the branches outside my window (ode to the mulberry) and sat in quiet indecision for the final book of the visit. Something a little longer and meatier, something that could envelop me in language. Robert Penn Warren. I hadn't opened the pages since I wrote my final English essay on it in January of 2000. My paperclips were still marking pages (I wouldn't highlight in the books), color coordinated to a long-forgotten system. I remembered the opening pages of driving on the road, mesmerizing and densely lucid, prose that lost me and lost itself as it carried on down the page, my eyes forming only the shapes of the words and losing the meaning, the semantics, but never the feeling of inevitability and purpose. I am left after this paragraph, the sort which repeats in every chapter, in a state of emotional connection to the text with a complete lack of actual memory of the words on the page. I simply absorb them without comprehension. When I slow to sort out the clauses and imagery and sequence I lose the urgency and feeling of the passages - they are meant to be felt more than read, I think, so I comply. I wonder if my writing here can ever achieve the same sort of hypnotic ebb and flow across a page, vocabulary of connotation and periphery, although I don't want to imitate Warren's style - I've already done that, seven years ago in an in-class exercise.