There are few concepts so difficult that they do not yield to the repeated
attack of the ordinary mind, and after dealing with all the basics over and
over, love, death, money, and simple bits of local confusion, the hairdresser
can tell you as well as any menticultured abstractionist that an inch is enough
to keep us from drowning, that solutions are always partial and always subject
to expiration, either short-term or long-term, and that . . . oh, yes, you
could go farther and fare worse.
--From Variation West
Such wisdom, so many pithy quotes, from this great novelist - and you knew her, live, in person! I hope you get her memoirs published soon, along with reflections of the woman as you knew her. Thx for this blog!
ReplyDeleteCarol, as soon as the novel is out, I'll start work on both of her memoirs. The first is "the love story of Ardyth and Egon," her husband, which includes some material from her earlier life, though it's not a complete autobiography; and the second one is stories from the year or two that she spent in New York after Egon died in 1962. Eventually I hope to publish a biography, too.
ReplyDeleteArdyth kept a commonplace book and frequently incorporated lines from other writers into her book. I've tried to figure out some of these (thanks to Google). The line "There are few concepts so difficult that they do not yield to the repeated attack of the ordinary mind" is from Helen Childs Boyden, a chemistry teacher at Deerfield Academy; in "The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield," by John McPhee (Macmillan, 1992), p. 48. The rest is apparently all Ardyth's.