Thrill-seeking

With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Did P.G. Wodehouse write thrillers? Well, yes, if you define the word thrill as Lynne Sharon Schwartz does, as a reader's reaction to exquisite language, language that soars, language that sings. That may be the whole reason for reading Wodehouse. A century after it was written, in some cases, his prose still amazes us. With Wodehouse, it is not so much what he says as how he says it. His readers mine each of his books for thrilling lines like this one from Something Fresh:  "I have often wondered what General Sherman would have said about private tutoring if he expressed himself so breezily about mere war."

One reason I use unlined 3x5 cards as bookmarks is so that I can make note of some of the most transcendent lines I come across in my reading. That Wodehouse line is one example. The one by Schwartz is another. Here are a few others:

"The secret motive of the absentminded is to be innocent while guilty." Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

"People who are flamboyantly good usually aren't." Richard S. Wheeler, Restitution

"Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it." Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

"We all write poems; it is simply the poets are the ones who write in words" John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

"I will love him like a camera lens that closes at too much light and opens at too little, so his blemishes will never mar my love." Akhil Sharma, An Obedient Father

"By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient." Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

I have been coming across thrilling lines that beautifully describe the weather we are beginning to experience in the Northern Hemisphere. Wodehouse, again in Something Fresh, writes, "Cold is the ogre which drives all beautiful things into hiding."

Early in The One-Way Bridge, Cathie Peltier puts it this way, "Mother Nature knew what she was doing all right. She was giving everyone some last splashes of red and orange and golden yellow before she gave them a solid blanket of white for months. Maybe, Edna thought, autumn was nature's way of apologizing."

Just yesterday afternoon I came upon this line in My Antonia by Willa Cather: "It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer."

When one reads what is commonly called a thriller, the thrills happen only once. Read it again and the thrill is gone. Not so with literary thrills like those listed above. The thrill returns again with each rereading.