November 15, 2013
I often read opening paragraphs of my favorite books to my clients with the intention of inspiring them to capture their reader in the first two paragraphs while symbolizing the depth of the content that will follow. So much time that I was sure I had blogged some of them, but I can’t find it now, so here a small sample are, with a brief (unnecessary) note about why I value them.
They say in the old tales that the first night after a child is born the Bidhata Purush comes down to earth himself to decide what its fortune is to be. That is why they bathe babies in sandalwood water and wrap them in soft red malmal, color of luck. That is why they leave sweetmeats by the cradle. Silver-leafed sandesh, dark panuas floating in golden syrup, jilipis orange as the heart of a fire, glazed with honey-sugar. If the child is especially lucky, in the morning it will all be gone.
“That’s because the servants sneak in during the night and eat them,” say Anju, giving her head an impatient shake as Abha Pishi oils her hair. This is how she is my cousin, always scoffing, refusing to believe. But she knows, as I do, that no servant in all Calcutta would dare eat sweets meant for a god.
The old tales say this also: In the wake of the Bidhata Purush come the demons, for that is the world’s nature, good and evil mingled…
What nonsense,” Anju says. “There are no demons.”
I am not so sure. Perhaps they do not have the huge teeth, the curved blood-dripping claws and bulging red eyes…but I have a feeling they exist. Haven’t I sensed their breath, like slim-black fingers brushing my spine?
Sister of My Heart, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
It doesn’t matter that the reader does not know the meaning of the terms, for they invoke an atmosphere and a perspective and a tension that you know will be played out in the chapters that follow. Entering a book like this is like stepping off a plane in a foreign country – your eyes and ears must receive without judgment until the context of every object becomes clear. I find that the great joy of both travel and reading – suspending all that I understand in order to be in-formed by another’s perception and intention.
Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming. Maybe I would visit with you for the weekend and then suddenly, because I am fickle like that, I would visit with the man from the corner shop instead – but you would not be sad because you would be eating a cinnamon bun, or drinking a cold Coca-Cola from the can, and you would never think of me again. We would be happy, like lovers who met on holiday and forgot each other’s names.
A pound coin can go wherever it thinks it will be safest. It can cross deserts and oceans and leave the sound of gunfire and the bitter smell of burning thatch behind. When it feels warm and secure it will turn around and smile at you, the way my big sister Nkiruka used to smile at the men in our village in the short summer after she was a girl but before she was really a woman, and certainly before the evening my mother took her to a quiet place for a serious talk. Of course a pound coin can be serious too. It can disguise itself as power, or property, and there is nothing more serious when you are a girl who has neither. You must try to catch the pound, and trap it in your pocket, so that it cannot reach a safe country unless it takes you with it.
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
The stark contrast of what is of unquestionable value and what has no intrinsic value except to herself intrigues me. The author (a man capable of capturing the spirit of the illegal Nigerian immigrant, a middle class London housewife, and a four year old boy so convincingly) is a genius I want to follow into every nook and cranny he describes, even if he ends up bricking me in with a cask of Amontillado.
I am not free of the condition I describe here. I cannot be certain how far back in human history the habit of denial can be traced. But it is at least as old as I am. [Does that phrase wake you up?] In our common history, I have found it in the legends surrounding the battle of Troy, and in my own family I have traced it three generations back, to that recent time past when there had been no world wars and my grandparents were young. All that I was taught at home or in school was colored by denial, and thus it became so familiar to me that I did not see it. Only now have I begun to recognize that there were many closely guarded family secrets that I kept, and many that were kept from me.
A Chorus of Stones, Susan Griffin
This book is a meditation on war – personal, profound, and unconcluded just as our culture is at this moment in history. A book I want to burrow back into frequently.
When I was a young boy, in a small village in northern Henan Province, I watched the sun rise and set beyond the edge of the earth, beautiful across the countryside. My father prepared me to be a famer, to tend a few acres of family land after I grew up. I thought the whole of the world was encompassed in what my two eyes could see. It was a world too small for big ideas and dreams.
I assumed I would grow up to be a farmer alongside everyone else in the village. I would have my few acres and work hard to make it productive so we would have enough food to eat. But everything in our lives changed.
In 1943 we abandoned our family home in the village where the Hsus had lived for seven hundred years…. The possibility of living in the twenty-first century in the USA was beyond my comprehension….
My entire youth was spent in a state of war – first vying warlords filling the vacuum created by the Nationalist Revolution that overthrew the Ching Dynasty in 1911, then the Japanese invasion in 1937, followed by Civil War in China which engaged seven million troops for four years.
Faith and Family, Chris Hsu
It was an honor to edit and oversee production of Chris’s memoir, published only for his family. The poet-farmer spent four of the formative years of adolescence fleeing the Maoist takeover, tossing him onto his wits in a world that had no known parameters. He retired as a professor of Linguistics from Southern Louisiana University.
What likely put Michaela over the edge, believe it or not, was a radish. It was a summer radish: a small, deeply red one with a crisp white interior; a little on the fiery side but not too much. It was meant to go into her salad.
Instead, the damn thing disappeared.
Incensed, Cary Jane Sparks
See how the adventure takes off from the simplest act. Cary’s book is a playful (in case you can’t tell from the opening) romp through the world of the humanistic psychology movement. Charming for those who participated.
Cemeteries remind us how awful it all is. Accidents waiting for the right time. Killers waiting for the right excuse. All kinds of sickness made specially for us. And then there’s the sickness people go looking for—that magic potion they just keep on downing even while it turns them all bloated and yellow-eyed and leaves them reeking in their casket like fish washed up in the river mud. Mama says I’m the grimmest child. I don’t think so. I just say what I see. Besides, I’m not the one who died and took off with their dreams. That was John. All them hopes Mama and Daddy had for him, they’re all cold in the ground, hanging off him like that too-big suit we buried him in.
Fearsome Trinity, Taylor Williams (unpublished)
This extraordinary use of language and images in consistent throughout this snapshot of Black Texas 1933. One of the most stunning pieces of writing I’ve ever found, and profoundly moving for the intimacy of its perspective. I’m determined to help get it published and widely distributed, because it matters to our culture and because we need to be brought to our knees by language like this.
Until next time, delight in the process.