In the Mountains on a Summer Day

Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.

Li Po b.701

I’ve obviously been re-reading Lord of the Rings, and then The Hobbit and I was about to read The Children of Húrin when I took a detour and purchased The Silmarillion. (and I think I figured out how to say it: SILL*mah*RILL*yun) I’ve only gotten past the intro by Christopher Tolkien and part way through the letter by JRR to his publisher. If you’d been outside my window last night you would have heard me saying wow. wow. wow. Repeatedly.

I always wonder how people write novels – to keep characters and places and timelines in order and yet here is this person who truly created not only a story line with a lot of characters (holy Tolstoy batman!) but a whole world and history and mythology surrounding it, and, it turns out, a lot of rather philosophical basis for why things happened when and how they did. That was a rather large WOW. And oh by the way – all rather due to a perceived lack of English mythology. Wow.

So yeah. That will keep me busy for awhile.

So what big reads do you read? What brings you back? Do you long for more info about what went on with the writer? (I’ll confess to similar questions about the writing of Kristin Lavransdatter) although the story line there is much simpler. I remember taking notes about characters in War and Peace LOL.

You know that old thing about having a notepad by your bedside so you can write down that idea that comes to you, unbidden, in the middle of the night? Well, I wasn’t awakened by a thought in the night but I was sure I had lost an idea from lack of writing it down.

Started routinely enough: I had a thought for a poem, one of those clear, in-the-moment thoughts that was just so clear. I rolled it around for a moment but I was in the middle of something else. It was so clear I wasn’t worried at all.

The next day, the same thought came wafting back in, again while I was away from any way of recording it. But – came to me again, rolled it around a bit inside my head, no worries.

And then – gone. I waited. I wasn’t too worried, and then I was actually sad for awhile. All I had was the knowledge that I had had a good idea and now it was totally gone. I couldn’t even remember what I had been doing when I’d had the good idea, let alone what the idea was.

This morning I locked myself out of the house on the way out the door. Jolly. I had an emergency key. As I drove I reviewed how to get into the house when I get home and wondered how it was I didn’t have a key hidden somewhere. And in fact, where was the spare set I always carry with me? Oh – took it out during all my recent travels. And where were they now? Hmmmmm. Ok check when I get back in tonight. As I mulled it over, I suddenly thought about the sadness of losing the good idea. And even more suddenly – there was the good idea!

Who knows. Moral of the story – write it down ASAP.