Beautiful Sentences Contest Winners: Toujours Bon Appetit!

The poet Keats, at the age of twenty-four,  penned these immortal words,

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

I thought of them often as readers and I struggled with how to evaluate the many different kinds of sentences entered into the contest to find the most beautiful one.

Of the 158 people who read the sentences, 11 entered the contest, and six voted.  One person, Sally Rogers, received two votes (one from Gutsy Writer Sonia Marsh and one from Marilyn Stein Lefeber, both bloggers) for the quote she entered. Congratulations, Sally, you are our grand prize winner!  Here’s the sentence:

“An original life is unexplored territory. You don’t get there by taking a taxi — you get there by carrying a canoe.” — Alan Alda

I took this quote to my memoir bookcase this morning, and enjoyed pondering which book to give Sally. I finally selected The Irrational Season by Madeleine L’Engle, a woman who carried her own canoe!  Before sending the book to Sally, I will return to some of the places I underlined.  Here’s a plucked sentence for you:  “Like the White Queen, I find it a good discipline to practice believing as many as seven impossible things before breakfast.”

Picking a book turned out to be so much fun, that I found one for all the people whose sentences attracted a voter.  Here, for example, is one for Wayne Ramsey, who offered so many wonderful sentences along with his reveries about them.  Karin Larson Krisetya, from Indonesia, picked the Yeats line,

“WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep”

I searched for a book about an abiding romance, one of the least frequently told stories in literature! It seems young love seldom lasts into old age or at least is seldom celebrated by the poets.  Yeats himself only yearned for this fate.  He did not experience it.  Julia Childs, however, apparently did. In My Life in France, her memoir of how she fell in love with her husband Paul, the country of France, and French cooking, Childs illustrates the value of a strong appetite–for food, for a place, and for the love of one’s life. Notice the two hearts on the cover.  Here’s the final beautiful sentence, which has Julia’s huge personality written all over it: “And thinking back on it [an unforgetable meal in 1948] now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite–toujours bon appetit!”

Speaking of the pleasures of the table. . .my dear neighbor Chin Pheng Oh offered her own thought: “Stand on the table once in awhile and open your eyes to a different view and perspective. Nothing is what it seems at first glance.” Betty Wiens, a blogger from Paraguay, voted for this sentence.  She knows it is true.

Chin has lived in two cultures, so she has stood on the table often.  I found this book just for her:  American Chica:  Two Worlds, One Childhood by Marie Arana. I have not read this book myself, but since Chin is my neighbor, I can always borrow it.

Kevin Kilmer, AKA Amish Guitar, gave us both a luscious sentence from Haven Kimmel and a lovely rant about not being able to vote in a contest without criteria.  For this sentence and for the rant he is awarded a prize also:  “The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it.” From A Girl Named Zippy, a delightful memoir I have not yet reviewed here.

I will be sending Kevin The Solace of Leaving Early, another book I have not read.  Let’s hope Kevin finds many beautiful sentences within its pages. Connie L. nominated this sentence because of its clarity, striking comparison, and the suggestion of mystery.

Finally, we have Bruce Hostetler, who picked a line from Dr. Suess,

“But tonight they’ve forgotten their feet are so sore
and that’s what the wonderful night time is for.”

Ila Stoltzfus, mother of Nik and therefore my daughter Kate’s future mother-in-law, selected this sentence.  Could it be that planning for a wedding brings back a lot of childhood memories?  For me, shopping for a wedding dress for a daughter or future daughter-in-law brings back memories of watching a child wobble away on a bike for the first time. Beauty and evanescence walk hand in hand into the night.

I thought of going down to the basement and pulling out a Dr. Suess book, but I am saving them in case I become a grandma some day.  Instead, I found the incredible story called House of Happy Endings by Leslie Garis. Do you know how Uncle Wiggly, The Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift stories were written? By ghost writers cranking out formula fiction that profited a franchise. Leslie Garis tells the tragic story of how her grandfather’s role in this literary production of happy endings for a mass audience led to sad endings for many others, especially her father.

I will need addresses from Sally, Kevin, and Bruce.  You can write to me at shirley.showalter@gmail.com

Enjoy the books.  Thanks for playing the game.  I hope we all think more deeply about the beautiful sentences all around us.

In the words of Julia Childs–tourjours bon appetit!

Beautiful Sentences: A Different Kind of American Idol Contest

About 200 people visit this website each week–not a great crowd, but one that is slowly growing.  Each time I log in to the dashboard to begin writing another post, I get another set of statistics that informs me which post is most popular and what search terms people are using that brings my blog to their attention.

A few weeks ago, I began to notice something.  One post I wrote about Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s book included the phrase “beautiful sentences” in the title.  That post has risen to near the top of my “most popular” entries, and the term “beautiful sentences” is one that has attracted more readers than any other in the last week.

Are you a discriminating reader who thinks about writing at the level of the sentence?  Do you have a few favorite quotes–beautiful sentences?  I invite you to submit them to a new contest located right here in the comments section of this post. The inbox will stay open until May 27 at 10 p.m.  I will gather up the quotes and make a new post out of all of them and then ask readers to vote on their favorites.  The winner will receive a memoir selected just for him or her from my overflowing memoir bookcase. Feel free to submit a sentence of your own! And enjoy the hunt for beautiful sentences in everything you read in the next week.

As you know, it was a contest that got me started writing memoir.  Maybe this one will get you started too!

Memoir and the Beautiful Sentence: Lenten Season Thoughts

My Lenten season reading this year includes Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s extended meditation on the prayer of St. Patrick. I have written about Marilyn in previous blogs and have read several books of her poetry.  My appreciation continues to grow for her spiritual and literary wisdom as I read more of her work.

Christ, My Companion is not a memoir, though it includes fascinating glimpses of the author’s life story.  Illuminating the prayer, one small piece at a time, Marilyn guides us from beginning to end.

Here is the famous “breastplate prayer” of St. Patrick:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, and in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre loves the play of language.  Her gorgeous book of poems about Vincent Van Gogh’s famous last paintings, The Color of Light, celebrates the paintings’ transformation of solid objects into forces of energy–or as she puts it, nouns into into verbs.

In Christ, My Companion, Marilyn employs the same grammatical logic she demonstrates in her poetry to the contemplation of another part of speech–the lowly preposition.  Each section of the 13-part prayer gets its own chapter.  Prepositions–with, within, behind, before, beside, to, beneath, above, in–change in each chapter, even if no other words change.  The result is a prism or finely-cut diamond in each case with Christ at the head of the sentence and the personal pronoun “me” at the end.

What connects Christ and me?  McEntyre shows us the ways by exploring angle, point of view, and position of the all-encompassing spirit of God.  When Christ is above, we catch a memoir glimpse of the author hustled out of doors when she was depressed:  “I went outside and looked up, through the branches of high trees, to the light that suddenly seemed like a constant stream of blessing.  I began to sit in my window seat evenings and watch the stars come out.”  The divine energy from above is not just a tonic to depression, however.  Within this chapter lie reflections on modern physics, hymn texts, the Nicene Creed, and Denise Levertov’s “Ascension.”

Marilyn brings us down to earth like a parachutist, then rises again with these words:  “Relinquishment is the cost of lifting up our hearts.  Only letting go, at least momentarily consenting to leave behind the things that bind us to this sticky, earthy life, will lighten us enough to be lifted up into a new plane of encounter with God, awareness of the life of the Spirit, fellowship with the communion of saints, hope of heaven.”

Even though this book is not a memoir, it offers testimony to a life immersed in spirit and word.  Only someone with the rhythm of King James English in her blood, a prayer book in her hand, and a heap o’ livin’ in her own life could have crafted sentence upon sentence of such shimmering praise-filled prose.