This article is right up my alley. Here’s a favorite opening of mine:
“Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.”.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
**
The Wasteland, TS Eliot
**
Or (it is all one sentence)
**
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
**
yep, Yeats for our time.
"At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time." Russell Baker, Growing Up.
I miss Russell Baker.
My high school journalism teacher revered him and she made sure we read his NY Times column religiously.
This article is right up my alley. Here’s a favorite opening of mine:
“Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.”.
—From Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
I'm alright now, but last week I was in rough shape.
Not sure that qualifies as literature, but it's definitely memorable. ;-)
I'll tell ya.