Swann

by Carol Shields

avuncular

interlocutor;

circumambient

caesura,

How that poor woman needed someone to “watch” her.

PMLA

prolixity

libidinous

V.S. Pritchett

oeuvre.

persiflage

cavil

“nature worshippers are vastly overrated as human beings, particularly in their own estimation.”

impunity.

Sporran.

This is something that has happened to him fairly frequently. A word or phrase or piece of trivia will completely slip out of his mind, only to reappear later when the need of it has passed. Objects mislaid, an appointment overlooked. It happens to everyone, of course – he knows that – and gets worse with age. From time to time, especially in the middle of a lecture, it has caused Jimroy a flutter of embarrassment. The phenomenon had to do with the breakdown of the oxygen supply to the brain cells.

Cantos;

métier

poleaxed,

woundlessness

Plenitude.

verdure,

(There were those who cruelly joked that she was the first of their acquaintance to divorce a man for sarcasm.)

But what he could not set aside was the fear that drilled through his shame, for it occurred to him that the photograph had altered and that Mary Swann had, unaccountably, become his enemy.

art naïf

mercurial.

Lachrymose

He is not such a fool; he tells himself, as to believe that poets and artists and musicians possess an integrity of spirit greater than other people. No, of course he has never gone in for that

unity of vision,

Died: violently, at the age of fifty. A cynic might call her death the only dramatic episode in a life that was a long surrender to the severity of seasons. Buried: outside Nadeau. In the Protestant cemetery.

But where? It must be somewhere. This is a small house, smooth-surfaced

And now that he needs her again, she’s bent on punishment. She is a sly one, a wily one. Women, women. Endlessly elusive and intent on victory. He admits it: for the moment at least, Mary Swann has defeated him.

?

always to the annual cycle, those seasons.

The power of these recurring seasons overwhelms the fragile scurryings of that obscure farm wife, Mary Swann, and what is left is a record of dullness and drudgery. And a heartbreaking absence of celebration, a life lived, as the saying goes, in the avoidance of biography.

casuistry,

The longest hour of the week is the one wrenched from the machinery of habit.

reeve

plangent

tonsured

syba...

ellipsis.

neologisms

She is fully conscious of her powers, appreciates the importance of good food, knows that books, particularly fiction, form a valuable core of experience, and believes she can trust Cruzzi absolutely to understand and

In literature she sniffs a kind of godly oxygen that binds one human being to the next and shortens the distance we must travel to discover that our most private perceptions are universally felt.