THE INCREDIBLE POWER OF WORDS

It made me happy to see my son Andrew lying on the living room couch yesterday reading a book. It was "The Sun also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway.

Later, as I passed through the room and MTV was back on the television, I told Andrew that Hemingway was one of my favorite authors. "Mine too!" He sounded happy to have that piece of information. Then, I think just because I wanted to remember the joy I’d gotten reading his words, as I headed into the front hall and walked up the stairs, I listed out loud all the titles of Hemingway’s books that I could remember.

The other day, something I wrote something in my blog brought back the memory of Albert Camus. Something about the thought of me as a young student thinking I had all the answers and discovering Sartre and Camus. On the way back from my Vet’s meeting Tuesday night, I stopped off at the library and found a book that I hadn’t read by Albert Camus—in English—one that had been published after his death. It’s called, "The First Man."

When I settled myself into bed and began to read, I was once again—as thankfully happens every once in awhile, swept away by the incredible power of words. Since the book was written in French and this is in English, credit has to go to the translator, David Hapgood, as well.

"Above the wagon rolling along a stony road, big thick clouds were hurrying to the East through the dusk. Three days ago they had inflated over the Atlantic, had waited for a wind from the West, had set out, slowly at first then faster and faster, had flown over the phosphorescent autumn waters, straight to the continent, had unraveled on the Moroccan peaks, had gathered again in flocks on the high plateaus of Algeria, and now, at the approaches to the Tunisian frontier, were trying to reach the Tyrrhenian Sea to lose themselves in it. After a journey of thousands of kilometers over what seemed to be an immense island, shielded by the moving waters to the North and to the South by the congealed waves of the sands, passing scarcely any faster above this nameless country than had empires and peoples over the millennia, their momentum was wearing out and some already were melting into occasional large raindrops that were beginning to plop on the canvas hood above the four travelers."