I was in a street market once, in Italy I think—it is difficult to be certain for I was quite small and we traveled often—and I remember being arrested by the incredible noise of the place. It was not especially loud under the yellow striped tent, but the multilingual transactions had an urgent energy to them that pierced me. All around and above me, tourists were haggling anxiously for cheap-smelling bags and flaking gold statuettes, and sensing their inexplicable desperation, I began to cry. I was a stoic child, rarely moved to tears by anything but acute anger, so these sudden sobs bewildered me as much as they did my parents. I still cannot be entirely sure why I cried that day, but I think it was because I recognized the restless throbbing hum of the market as the sound that has relentlessly occupied my own mind for the entirety of my conscious memory.
It was around that time that my mother began reading the Hardy Boys books to my brothers and me. I was about four, and had been reading proficiently for a couple of years, but there was still something magical about being read to. My mother was a Real Estate agent then, and she took my brothers and me with her to showings and open houses, meetings and closings. So we read every book in that series in a different living room, on a different stranger’s couch. As my mother read to us, she would often pause and ask us to define a word, and if we could not, we had to look it up in a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary that was far too heavy for me to lift.
I was intoxicated by that dictionary. I hoarded words like my brothers hoarded couch cushion nickels, sharing them only most reluctantly. I delighted in the dictionary’s enormity; nothing pleased me more than the knowledge that my language was beautiful and terrible enough to contain me and everything I had been and could ever be. For each word I could use to describe something, there was surely a better one possible, but this thrilled rather than discouraged me. I think I knew even then that my life would always be at once consumed and enriched by the search for the perfect word.
Thus I was but an infant when I discovered the power of words to bring delight, and before my childhood was over I also would come to understand their ability to cause ineffable devastation. Yet even in the most desolate moments of my relationship with language, I remained in awe of its splendor. Indeed, is there not more beauty in one moment of intense pain than in a hundred of great joy?
When I was seven, or perhaps eight, I was given an assignment to write a descriptive essay about a place. I remember the feeling of the writing more than the work itself, but I believe I described a cave or a cavern of some sort. And as I sat there with my pencil and my wide-ruled composition book, the humming energy coursing through my little body connected with something and I began to write. It was not easy; the words did not flow unimpeded from my brain to the page. But it was exhilarating, and it was exactly right. When I finished, I was accused of copying the passage from a book or a magazine. Although nobody was able to prove my guilt, the doubt lingered.
Face burning in shame for something I did not do, I buried my words beneath the day’s waste in the bottom of the trash compactor. It would be almost ten years before I again felt the exhilaration of writing with my whole being.
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