This Is This

I slipped into you, into your conversation, as easily as a newborn soul slips into its first skin.

I read that over the weekend and it blew me away and just now I blew someone else away with it. A guy who always reads books on the bus and is sitting next to me as I write this. If I can flatter myself with one vanity, it’s that my fellow commuters see me working on this computer every morning and they might wonder what I’m doing.

The more astute might figure that I’m not doing work, as I’m not looking up and around and thinking, or sending emails and closing and opening files. No, I’m typing - solidy and non-stop and occasionally changing the music in my ears to put a different slant on the writing. As I’ve said many times, writing is a creative process over which I have no control.

I’d like to be better at it and produce stuff that stops people in their tracks, even though the tracks we make these days are rare. But that’s what the above phrase did to me this morning. It comes from the blog of a comedian who think is great - a guy called Liam McEneany.

I typed the phrase in bold at the top of the page like I did here, to write about it, but now this post has taken a different course, because my fellow commuter glimpsed up from his book (David Crystal - The Stories of English) and read it on my screen.

Then he paused in thought, closed his book on his thumb, and has been in that pose long enough for me to type this entire post. He probably thinks I’m smarter than I am.

I know it doesn’t mean I’m stupid just because I can admire the work of my contemporaries. Henry Ford was obsessed with the achievements Thomas Edison. Tolkien was fascinated with the work of his friend CS Lewis.

Speaking of souls and him, CS Lewis said: “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

This is something I don’t know anything about and I would urge you to question anyone who says they do, but you can’t deny its beauty on this cold, cloudy Monday.

I hope your week’s all right. Have a good one.

Also on This Is This
I’d like to extend my congratulations to Tropical Storm Florence which has just been upgraded to hurricane status.
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This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 9:09 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.