In the first volume, Fear and Spear, of the three-volume novel Your Face Tomorrow (page 85), a retired Oxford don Peter Wheeler experiences a sudden blockage and cannot find the word for the object he's asking the narrator to bring him. It's not an age thing, we learn, just a momentary slip, something that happens to all of us, he calls it "momentary aphasia" and it happens to him with "the most stupid words", he says. The word in question was "cushion".
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend and he was telling me how up until the 1950s , 1960s Americans had a common culture, references they all shared, agreed upon and understood. This is no longer the case, we both agreed, and to describe it I sought a word that just wouldn't come eluding me completely. I used some poor substitute, which I no longer remember, and then, an hour later, the topic long past, we were parting, by a stroke of luck I somehow managed to avoid the familiar l'esprit d'escalier experience by remembering the verb "to disperse". Yes, the culture became dispersed, I said. But no, I later realized that a better word would have been "fragmented", and still not the word I needed. I searched the Thesaurus and found nothing better.
Until three days ago, when I was reading Decoded by Mai Jia, where I found my word. The following day, I tried to recall the sentence in which it appeared, and I searched the book backwards 5 pages from where I had stopped, reading it forward, then 10 pages, again reading forward, then 15 and 20, until frustrated I gave up to return to my bookmark, when I found it one page back (202), where an epigraph from some book (non-existent) that the main character had bought is quoted saying (while describing genius):
Like any other treasure in the world, they are delicate, fragile as a newly planted bud; once hit they crack; once cracked they fracture.
No comments:
Post a Comment