Gold to Airy Thinness Beat

A before-and-after paragraph and a superior fragment.

This is a just-okay paragraph:

Before
If there is one place besides my own bedroom that I felt safe and secure, it was that room, in that house. I can still feel the tightness of tucked sheets at my toes, smell the lingering notes of detergent on freshly laundered linen, see curtains sucked and billowed between facing corner windows, and hear the soft, sleepy bells of St Luke assuring me that God was nearby.

This is better and how I posted it; it's from my post here :

After
If there's one place besides my own bedroom that I felt safe and secure, it was that room, at night, when the house was asleep and summer heat sucked and billowed curtains between facing corner windows. I can still feel the cool tightness of tucked sheets at my toes, smell lingering detergent on freshly laundered pillow cases, and hear the bells of St Luke, only one block over but soothing and dull as if miles away, dissolved by distance

I wasn't happy with the four senses (feel, smell, see, hear) lined up like train cars; their very order and brevity was drawing too much attention to structure. I also did not, as a child, here God in the bells. I most definitely felt a religious comfort, and a childlike insight into that comfort, but I didn't feel God close to me as you would normally interpret that sensation.

I still don't like "I can still feel." It's not bad, but it's contrived. I can't still feel it, I can only remember it. It's what people say when they want you to feel how much they feel.

Note something more interesting, however; there is a line in the previous paragraph regarding goose down pillows that is very strong.

... as I got older (tweenish), Grandma put me in Aunt Dottie's room, which was large, with a high, soft bed and goose down pillows that compressed to a mere feather's breadth beneath the weight of my head.

That line, along with "when the house was asleep and summer heat sucked and billowed curtains between facing corner windows," create tangible images that don't rely on "I can still feel" or see or hear.

"Like gold to airy thinness beat," as John Donne wrote, though the tether in this case is between a writer and his childhood, a far dearer relationship than between any two contemporaries.

Started: 2012-03-08