Chapter XX: The End of the Middle Ages

He carried her to the window, so that she, too, saw all the view.

--E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

He, being George Emerson, being the room with a view. 

Chapter IX: Lucy as a Work of Art

Lucy thinks of Cecil as a "drawing-room"--a room without a view--although to Cecil, Lucy is his only view. The paradox here of how they regard each other foreshadows their separation. For there cannot be a view in a drawilfng-room, and Cecil is left as a confined, selfish man despite his affected ambience of sophistication. When he asks Lucy what kind of room he is to her, and with what view, she unequivocally answers, "With no view, I fancy" and adds the rejoinder, "Why not?" as if Cecil should have known this already. As if it is no question whether Cecil is a windowless room, for he undeniably is. 

One Writer's Beginnings

I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it.

These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there's so much more of life that only words can convey— strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. 

Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

I was reading the Smithonian and stumbled upon this article about Welty--not only the writer, but also the photographer. I had read and analyzed a brief piece of her work in my AP English Language class for only forty-five minutes, but that was enough to convince me of her great writing. How as a young girl she had to put up with the "dragon" librarian and still kept reading nevertheless. How she became a writer--and also an artist.

I am done, I would like to say. I am done with words, as I write down my three thousand two hundred ninety-seventh word zephyr. But of course I will never be done. Never with words.

"The word is a flame burning in a dark glass."

--Shelia Watson

1452

1452. Frond: the leaf of leaflike part of a palm, fern, or similar plant


Freddy reared a freckled face and a pair of snowy shoulders out of the fronds.

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

I never thought I would come across a word like frond, except in biology books. But here is Forster using my 1452nd vocabulary!