Silas House's Blog, page 8

The (Im)Perfect Word

Writers are always looking for the perfect word, the perfect sentence. Put a bunch of writers together for a little while and you'll most likely hear one of them declare "I love that word" in response to something someone has uttered.

We are not normal (and don't want to be); we actually discuss our favorite words. Mine is "gloaming". A friend of mine prefers the word "Sabbath". Another favors "diaphanous". Writers are people who love words, ...

Well, I fell a little bit short of my original challenge to discover something new everyday posts because I didn't make it the whole month.  In fact, I only made just over half a month.  I won't list the reasons why here, but let's just say life intervened, as it sometimes does.  And here's a discovery I made (which I already knew, but had to be reinforced for me):  sometimes life must take the driver's seat, even over your writing.  The thing is, though, life doesn't know this, but no matter...

Good dogs are everything that humans hope to be, but never have quite achieved yet.  
When I think back on all my good dogs I had when I was a boy, I can't help getting a little bit sad. There was Arky, a little obese weiner dog my aunt in Arkansas gave me.  He thought he was a big, ferocious dog, and would bare his teeth to anyone who threatened me.  He sat right beside me when I propped my back against a tree to read a summer afternoon away.  There was Fala, a white spitz I named after FDR a...

Every morning the whole world gives us the opportunity to start our lives anew. 
That's what I kept thinking as I drove the winding roads of Eastern Kentucky yesterday as the land cameawake.  A thin mist breathed out over on the hills and hollers.  A white rind of moon in the strugglingshadows of first daylight.  The sky burned purple and gray on the horizon.  I passed through Big Hill, Morrill, Clover Bottom, Sand Gap, Gray Hawk, Mummie, Elias, Traveller's Rest, Levi, and other little...

1. A homeplace, left to be devoured by the ironweed.  Once, someone lived there.   A family, maybe.  They had lives and loves and sorrows and most of all, they had their own stories.  In the cool of the day they'd sit on the porch and tell big tales and flies buzzed in the kitchen and the children ran down to the creek to play and a woman with weary eyes broke beans on the porch, so used to this work that her hands didn't even think about what they were doing.  One of the children--the last o...

An especially terrible headache is as big and endless and dark as the ocean, stretched tight across the globe, middled by black white-capping waves that chop at the horizon, a largeness and darkness like death.

The discovery blogs are temporarily on hold while Silas is briefly out of the country.  In the meantime, a reading from ELI THE GOOD...(double click to watch full-screen)

Once you stop dancing, you die a little.

            I used to dance all the time.  In my early twenties, we were out at honkytonks every Saturday night.  I ran around with all of my cousins back then.  We never went anywhere without each other.  Even when we weren't at a bar or a club, we'd find a way to dance. If we were in a restaurant that had a jukebox loaded down with good songs, we'd get up and dance.  Didn't matter if there wasn't a dance-floor.  We'd lean our heads back, close our e...

I love books.  I love reading them, but there is even more than that.

            Touch. I love how cool the pages are when you first open them in the mornings.  Or how warm the pages are if you've left it out in the car for awhile in the summer, like something baked the exact right length of time.  The endpapers and the spine and the little letters that are sometimes imbedded in the cloth, a kind of Braille for book-lovers. 

            Smell.  The new ones: people talk about a new-car...

Holiness shows itself when you are not watching for it.

Sunday, the Sabbath, the holiest day of seven holy days, I was in a car with several of my closest friends and my two daughters. Members of my given and chosen family. We had been to the top of the mountain to look out at three states. There, there, and there, we said. "Look at Kentucky, it's the prettiest," one of us said, laughing. "No, Virginia is," said another. "On a clear day you can see North Carolina," somebody else said, "a...