A bit of a change of pace, today. I’ve not read Washington Irving outside of the high-school standards — “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow” — but last night, as marvelous Spanish guitar sparkled from the stereo, I was drinking Madeira from the bottle and savoring the mellifluous prose of his Alhambra:
The ancient kingdom of Granada, into which we were about to penetrate, is one of the most mountainous regions of Spain. Vast sierras, or chains of mountains, destitute of shrub or tree, and mottled with variegated marbles and granites, elevate their sunburnt summits against a deep-blue sky; yet in their rugged bosoms lie ingulfed verdant and fertile valleys, where the desert and the garden strive for mastery, and the very rock is, as it were, compelled to yield the fig, the orange, and the citron, and to blossom with the myrtle and the rose.
On paper, it’s close to a run-on sentence, but read it aloud, as if on stage (as I did to the wife), and the words work their magic. Damn, the man could write. Small wonder he was the first post-Revolutionary American author to achieve international renown.
I’m past 40 years old, now. I’ve spent most of the past 30 years building my library, and I’m finally able to settle down most evenings with a book that may have been in my possession for decades but whose contents are brand-new to me. I’m like a kid opening a present when I get to do that, you understand. I’ve been building up to this for a long time; Christmas most every night, for the next forty years, that’s what I’ve been looking forward to. And this Fall I finally realized that if I didn’t start doing it, it wasn’t going to happen.
What this all means for you, of course, is that I’m gonna be tossing book reviews into the RNS mix on a fairly regular basis. Enjoy!