I added one sentence and I think it fixed a lot of my issues, go figure. I reread this so many times that it eventually got painful. When you look at something so many times, it's hard to see the answers. I would ask your honest opinion as to whether this expressed it's target or crossed the line into pretentiousness. I was trying to express the division between my past, intellectually obsessed and shallow self by stylisticly contrasting the excessive exaggeration of my perceptions of my first love, and the slightly deeper future-me who more modestly expresses the value of the greatest love I know, my wife. I really tried at something here and was not quite satisifed with the results. I couldn't go as far into flowery language as it required without lapsing into poetry. I also had trouble melding the two styles, flowery and plain, anywhere in the middle so I had to resort to a jarring and confusing complete shift downward. It then fell on the reader to understand the meaning. There were fallbacks in case the reader missed the nested message and it could have been the division between the two loves or the loss of the one. That would just be sloppy, though.
I walked away, destiny forked a bit to the right and I haven't seen her in many, many years. I am going to be thirty three in May. I have been married to Petra, who I met only three years ago, for over two years. The living room is our usual haunt and life is simple. My nice blue chair is torn to shreds, that grey cat she loves so much sharpens his claws on it every chance he gets. She is sitting next to me watching T.V. and Matthew is playing on the floor. He screams and runs away from the cat then chases it with a yellow plastic hammer. I have gotten fat and learned to laugh at myself, what does it matter, I'm married? She's a furnace underneath that blanket and I am freezing, I think I might join her. I don't recall all the details from the day we met, in fact there is a lot I don't remember about our relationship. It seems neither of us really cares since we know tomorrow could be our anniversary and we would celebrate it the same way. I would sit on this chair, she would sit on that couch underneath her blanket. Matty would play on the floor. There are no more brown eyes but hers, and the whale can go chase itself. I am satisfied and I don't wonder, wander or worry anymore, my wife has got my back. We put Matty down for a nap and climb onto the couch together. Falling asleep with my wife on a sunny afternoon is better than spaghettios with parmesan cheese.
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2 comments:
Yes, your slight changes make a big difference. All set in the ENG 101 department.
The highest compliment I can give you is that when I was done reading this I couldn't remember what essay type essay 5 was supposed to be and I knew it didn't matter since, whatever the type, you'd just simply gone and written an essay, a real one for purposes apart from a grade.
I'm flattered that you'd ask my opinion about your style and success, but to a certain extent I'm going to beg off. I do know about your topic from personal experience and in your writing certainly recognized some of those old feelings--and to the extent I was swept along, I was your reader, not your teacher.
Now I look back at your concerns and try to figure out what, if anything, I can say about targets, pretentiousness, love, and language.
My first reaction is that language was not designed to describe very well what you want to describe: if it were, would most music, most novels, most entertainment always be buzzing around the damn topic? Wouldn't we have the poem, essay, novel, movie, song that said it all, once and for all, no new ones need apply?
Putting it another way: when you write it, you to some extent relive it and that invites the reader in but also sets a limit on how far the reader can come in. We've had similar experiences, so we enter; we have not had your experience, so we stop. So, how do we then judge your language, the choices you've made with the words since they are more than words (they go, as I say, a little way toward reliving or recreating the experience.)
That isn't to say that anytime anyone writes about something like this, I would withold judgment and say, 'Anything is good, I can't judge.' If something bothers me or I think it's crap, I'll say so.
I can, but I cetrtainly don't feel that impulse here.
You've made the choices you've made about words and language, and I'm tender about those choices, have no interest in judging, reassuring, or even being much of a sounding board for you with this. It's personal to you. You can change it, but if you do, it's got to be all you, not a production where you got advice, opinion, outside point of view. It's an inside piece....
As you say, you really tried something here, and I respect that far too much to want to add anything to it, even comment.
Well, I too am having a hard time finding my target and am repeating myself.
Thank you for these notes. I took a few really good points away from them as usual. I think that I wouldn't change it, one sentence did the trick in my eyes.
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