happy shades
To illustrate the awesome ways in which the English language, with its various verb tenses, allows us to convey different moods and feelings, I have, until now, often quoted a rather thin line -- “I’ll be loving you forever, and I’ve been loving you so long” -- from the chorus of a love song.
This late afternoon, in reading Alice Munro’s story “Walker Brothers Cowboy” -- the first story in her first published collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), I found the following passage that strikes me as a grand example of how the perfect tense allows us to slide back and forth on this continuum of time.
Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive – old, old – when it ends. I do not like to think of it.
When I want a simple, genuinely human story, free of gimmicks and language that draws attention onto itself, I go back to Alice Munro, who I could easily say is my favourite short story writer. She wasn’t published until she was around 40. She seems to have only lived in small town Ontario through most of her life. Not a world traveler, yet her observations of the human condition are beyond this world.
I was reading, in the late afternoon, on a bench in Tsim Sha Tsui East, and when I finished reading, it was already dark and the lights on the Regal Hotel came on. I lay on the bench for a while, closed my eyes, felt the sounds from the fountain from a distance and I felt very much at home, very much at home.
This late afternoon, in reading Alice Munro’s story “Walker Brothers Cowboy” -- the first story in her first published collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), I found the following passage that strikes me as a grand example of how the perfect tense allows us to slide back and forth on this continuum of time.
Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive – old, old – when it ends. I do not like to think of it.
When I want a simple, genuinely human story, free of gimmicks and language that draws attention onto itself, I go back to Alice Munro, who I could easily say is my favourite short story writer. She wasn’t published until she was around 40. She seems to have only lived in small town Ontario through most of her life. Not a world traveler, yet her observations of the human condition are beyond this world.
I was reading, in the late afternoon, on a bench in Tsim Sha Tsui East, and when I finished reading, it was already dark and the lights on the Regal Hotel came on. I lay on the bench for a while, closed my eyes, felt the sounds from the fountain from a distance and I felt very much at home, very much at home.
posted by Adam C at
12:02 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home