My blue journaling chair faces bookshelves, and every so often, searching for a topic, my eyes scan the titles, many of them provoking fond memories — Cyrano de Bergerac — Oh, what a rush that was , rushing through Rostand’s story like a hungry beast, gobbling up the poetry and the poignancy and the love of words, laughing out loud at the scene where Cyrano comes up with 20 better insults than poor Valvert can muster — the depth of his love for Roxanne expressed through the letters he writes for de Neuvillette — and the heartbreaking final scene where Roxanne realizes her true love has been her dear friend all along. To this day my tears well up at the words “My white plume!”
Ah, there’s Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles and I’m falling in love with Ray Bradbury all over again — 100 Selected Poems of E.E. Cummings and oh how words can across the page in unexpected turns dance so! — the biography of Gandhi that opened my mind to nonviolent civil disobedience and love — The Scarlet Letter and the unexpected delight of an English class assignment becoming a page-turner — and again with Wuthering Heights — there’s a line of Harlan Ellison books and oh-so-late-in-life Edgar Rice Burroughs —
What a magnificent symphony words can make in the hands of masters.