Since this is my first paragraph here are a few of the opening paragraphs of texts we’ve been working with this term…I’ll think up some lesson ideas with them next.
…You can call me Link. It’s not my name, but it’s what I say when anybody asks, which isn’t often. I’m invisible, see? One of the invisible people. Right now I’m sitting in a doorway watching the passers-by. They avoid looking at me. They’re afraid I want something they’ve got, and they’re right. Also they don’t want to think about me. They don’t like reminding I exist. Me, and those like me. We’re living proof that everything’s not all right and we make the place untidy.//Hang about and I’ll tell you the story of my fascinating life…
They called him Moche the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life. He was a man of all work at Hasidic synagogue. …The Jews of Sighet – that little town in Transylvania where I spent my childhood – were very fond of him. He was very poor and lived humbly. Generally my fellow townspeople, though they would help the poor, were not particularly fond of them. Moche the Beadle was the exception. Nobody ever felt embarassed my him. Nobody ever felt encumbered by his presence. He was a past master in the art of making himself insignificant, of seeming invisible….
…My earliest memories are a confusion of hilly fields and dark, damp stables, and rats that scampered along the beams above my head. But I remember well enough the day of the horse sale. The terror of it stayed with me all my life…
…There was once in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue…
…She was scandalizin’ my name, She took my money, She called me honey, But she was scandalazin’ my name. Called it love but was playin’ a game…(He gets up and moves the bucket. Stands thinking for a moment then, raising his arms to hold an imaginary partner, he launches into an intricate ballroom dance step. Although a mildly comic figure, he reveals a reasonable degree of accomplishment.) Hey Sam. (Sam absorbed in the comic book, does not respond.) Hey Boet Sam! (Sam looks up) I’m getting it. The quickstep. Look now and tell me. (He repeats the step.) Well?…
…On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gently drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit. “He was always dreaming about trees,” Placida Linero, his mother, told me twenty seven years later, recalling the details of that unpleasant Monday. “The week before, he’d dreamed that he was alone in a tinfoil airplane and flying through the almond trees without bumping into anything,” she told me. She had a well earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people’s dreams, provided they were told her before eating, but she hadn’t noticed any ominous augury in those two dreams of her son’s, or in the other dreams of trees he’d told her about, the mornings preceding his death…
…It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried out bed of the old North Sea…
…There is a land beyond the forests. A land so beautiful that as you stand at the edge of the trees and gaze across the pastures to the snow-brushed mountains, you know that heaven is surely but a step away. From this land comes a song, and from the song comes a story. A story of murder…
…EXCUSE ME SIR, but may I be of assistance? Ah I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services…
…MAY I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding? I fear you may not be able to make yourself understood by the worthy gorilla who presides over the fate of this establishment. In fact he speaks nothing but Dutch. Unless you authorise me to plead your case, he will not guess you want gin. There, I dare hope he understood me; that nod must mean that he yields to my arguments. He’s on the move; indeed, he is making haste with a sort of careful deliberateness. You are lucky; he didn’t grunt. When he refuses to serve someone, he merely grunts. No one insists. Being a master of one’s moods is the privelege of the larger animals. Now I shall withdraw, Monsieur, happy to have been of help to you. Thank you; I’d accept if were sure of not being a nuisance. You are too kind. Then I shall bring my glass over beside yours…
…They’d stolen a march on the day. The sky was like dark glass, reluctant to let the light through. The only sound was the chudder of the van skirting the lough. The surface of the water was colourless. The hills slumped down on the far side like silhouettes of snoozing giants…
…The minicab office was up a cobbled mews with little flat houses either side. That’s where I first met Violet Park, what was left of her. There was a healing centre next door – a pretty smart name for a place with a battered brown door and no proper door handle and stuck on wooden numbers in the shape of clowns. The 3 of number 13 was a w stuck on sideways and I thought it was kind of sad and I liked it at the same time…
