The title of this entry is a verse from a song Mia sings in “La La Land” during her audition. It’s the climax of the song, in my opinion, and also a verse that describes my life nowadays quite well. I’ve been starting my mornings listening to “Another Day of Sun” and playing “City of Stars” on the piano in Hassell Hall. One day, while I was doing so, I faintly heard across the hall someone else in a neighboring piano room playing “Mia and Sebastian’s theme.” It was a serendipitous moment because what are the chances two people are in the same music hall playing pieces from the same movie soundtrack at the same time? I could have looked to see who it was, but I didn’t.
I read a collection of stories called The Shell Collector the other day, sitting outside in the library breezeway. Anthony Doerr is a writer I like very well, and I had just discovered this story collection. Well, it was beautiful, but the prose was sometimes too much like poetry for my liking. There were some moments, like “the world was washed in amber,” that made me still and breathless like I was that wide-eyed deer in the forest myself, listening to the earth. But the storytelling—there was something about it that would often go overboard. It would suspend me into the air with lots of promise, but then I would hear voices beckoning from all different directions I wasn’t sure where to look. The vivid picture it promised dissolved into a fragmented aggregate of strings. No matter how hard I tried, it always took too long to get from one point to another. Lots of loops instead of clean straight lines. Essentially, the entire thing felt like a tangled, aerial snarl, and you couldn’t have taken that and made a nice neat knot of it. Not that there’s anything wrong with a snarl. It was just overpowering in its fantasy especially when the bulk of the story was made up of such material. Furthermore, I think some stories tried too hard to be beautiful that it all just sort of washed over my head and I had trouble finding the moment that was supposed to anchor the story, the center of gravity to make everything else fall into place.
He also focused a lot on images. So a lot of it didn’t make sense. A hunter and his dream-seeing wife making love in a flower field after a long valley winter—that’s all very well, but what are they doing? Embodying primitive urges in an Eden-esque location, maybe, but realistically it would certainly be a strange picture. I also disliked the preternaturally solemn tone Doerr somehow maintained throughout everything—it felt pretentious at times.
But, you know—it’s a lovely book to get lost in, if you’re ever in the mood to read about shells and love and women who like to run.
