Falling in Love with Reading Full Sentences Again

I work part-time at a super company working in the social/text analytics space. They have some amazing technology and my role is to research and write about social media trends, engage with our customers and develop our analytics strategy. Very. Cool. Stuff. I love how the way we are communicating, sharing and collaborating and using tools that did not exist even 5 years ago is changing how we work and to some degree what we work on.  But sometimes at the end of the day after taking in too many 140 character shots of content, I feel I have all these sparks of ideas/thoughts going off in my head. Not necessarily unpleasant but I do feel  like I need to find a quiet place and sort through all of the data I have absorbed during the day…and make notes of topics I want to remember and think and maybe write more about.

But it might also be why sentences like this rivet my attention and nourish my imagination:

“I remember the moment that I first saw the house. I remember the date, even the precise hour. We drove up into Saint-Cyprien for the first time on a crisp, gusting morning. The tree were turning, leaves spinning up and and off into tossing thickets. The sun was high, the sky that intense Ricketts blue of childhood: brilliant, hard, washed clean by the recent mistral, it sparkled like a polished mirror….I saw, far below, the rippled red-tiled roof of a modest, compact farmhouse, standing four-square to the winds on a green plateau below which spilled terrace upon terrace of great olive trees. Beyond the terrace a little pointed hill crowned by a chapel. Beyond that, a valley. Beyond the valley, golden with fading vines, the jagged line of the Estoril mountains, lilac against the harsh, scoured blue of the sky, and, to the far left, distant, sparkling, dancing in the light, teased by the wind, the mistral-whipped seam creamed with little flickering waves.” (A Short Walk from Harrods, Bogarde Dirk)

BEAUTIFUL. I even enjoyed typing it out – the image of the sea sparkling in the sun made more real for me by typing each word.  Short punches of information that lead to a trail of deeper reading and understanding is wonderful. But creating imagery, characters and scenes with language is both a gift to the writer and the reader.

Now, I’m off to run the furs and get back to studying. I received some great feedback from my plea for suggestions to fill out my curriculum on sustainability, so now it’s time to get stuck in.