As I get older I become more certain of books that influence my life. I have written about singularly good first paragraphs before.
Now with my insomnia, I have come to understand that there are two books I can never ever forget. One is William Gibson’s Neuromancer with that impossible to forget first paragraph,
The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.
In the heels of my latest blog about suicide I cannot but state here that Jane Rule’s book Taking My Life contains a damnably fine first paragraph, much too long for me to remember verbatim.
Writing an autobiography may be a positive way of taking my own life. Beginning in the dead of winter, mortal with abused lungs and liver, my arthritic bones as incentive for old age, I may be able to learn to value my life as something other than the hard and threateningly pointless journey it has often seemed. I have never been suicidal but often stalled, as I have been now for some months, not just directionless, but unconvinced that there is one. No plan for a story or novel can rouse my imagination, which resolutely sleeps, feeding on the fat of summer. And so, I take my life, with moral and aesthetic misgivings, simply because there is nothing else to do.
While, I too am not suicidal, I feel so lucky to have met this woman and photographed her. When I enter my ground floor visitor’s bathroom I first see three framed photographs of my Rosemary. And then by the toilet, staring at me there is Jane Rule’s Taking My Life.
