A Literary Collage

How do I love books? Let me count the ways…

Did You Know?

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse was inspired by the Godrevy Lighthouse, which could be seen from the summer home the author’s family vacationed in when she was young. In 1921, she wrote in her diary: “Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall? One’s past, I suppose; I see children running in the garden…The sound of the sea at night…almost forty years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: so much I could never explain.” After reading the book for the first time, Woolf’s sister said it was like seeing their mother raised from the dead. Their summer vacations ended abruptly with the death of their mother in 1895, when Woolf was thirteen.

The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).

At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.

I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.

In this array ’mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.
In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

Word Wonder

ACCIDENCE (ak-si-duhns): noun, the study of inflection as a grammar device
Do you pronounce it Caribbean or Caribbean?

AORIST (ey-uh-rist): noun, a verb tense that expresses past action without implying either continuance or momentariness
If the man was poisoned, is he poisoned still?

APPOSITION (ap-uh-zish-uhn): noun, a syntactic relationship between a noun phrase and the noun it describes
Larry, the cucumber or Larry the Cucumber?

Sentence Study

The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock: in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
-Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

Most of us have studied Shirley Jackson’s haunting short story in an English class. The gentle, comfortable tone Jackson adopts in the story’s set-up resulted in many readers requesting information about the location of the fictional town when it was first published. For those familiar with the horror that builds as the story continues, this reading may seem faulty, but Jackson’s tone likely avoids hinting at the violence to come on purpose. The tonal shift in the story further lends itself to its purpose: to demonstrate the striking ordinariness of violent atrocities committed in everyday life.

A 2006 Letter from Maya Angelou to Her Future Self

Dear Marguerite,

You’re itching to be on your own. You don’t want anybody telling you what time you have to be in at night or how to raise your baby. You’re going to leave you mother’s big comfortable house and she own’t stop you, because she knows you too well.
But listen to what she says:
When you walk out of my door, don’t let anybody raise you—you’ve been raised.
You know right from wrong.
In every relationship you make, you’ll have to show readiness to adjust and make adaptions.
Remember, you can always come home.
You will go home again when the world knocks you down—or when you fall down in full view of the world. But only for two or three weeks at a time. Your mother will pamper you and feed you your favorite meal of red beans and rice. You’ll make a practice of going home so she can liberate you again—one of the greatest gifts along with nurturing your courage, that she will give you.
Be courageous, but not foolhardy.

Walk proud as you are,

Maya