I enjoy about half the books I read. I give up on most of them because they are boring. But every now and then I run across a writer who grabs my lapels and makes me sit up and pay attention to the usage of words.

I particularly love writers who throw words around like jewels. I love people who can toss off a few words or sentences that don’t have a helluva lot to do with their subject, but just because they are wise and fun.

Those words are like sun-diamonds on the lake of literature.

One of America’s very best at such was a woman named M.F.K. Fisher. For sixty years she wrote brilliant books and essays — usually about food. But even  vegetarians who eat nothing but damp lettuce can be thrilled by her dancing through her world of words. because she’d toss those sky-diamonds among her paragraphs,  just to make sure we’re paying attention.

Here is a collection of a few of my favorite examples of M.F.K.’s words, from several of her books.

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“She was one of those few people who said  ‘cahn’t’ and pronounced ‘aunt’ as if it were not an insect.”

“She bit off her words with a near-snap of her firm jaw.”

“We saw Mrs. Chafee herself only once, and then she was as if made of cobwebs on an enormous bed, nourished perhaps be three peeled grapes a day and a sip of yellow wine. She smiled faintly and waved at us, with a grey-white hand so thin it was like a filament or tentacle pushing out from the froth of lace she lay in.”

“…her bedroom, which of course we never used for anything as carnal as our own relievings.”

“…so sated we could hardly lift our eyelids.”

“I prefer to leave it where Jesus has flang it.”

“It was the perfect wine for that dish, as I taste in now on my mind’s tongue.”

“I myself, as an adult, often feel like a great pink Anglo-Saxon cow when I am with Japanese women.”

“…her strange smell of rice pwoder, like a stale marshmallow.”

“Her right-foot toes were vibrating like a snake’s tongue at the end of her long leg.”

“Her nurses must have spent hours picking up the tiny, colorless body and dipping it like an egg being poached into perfumed water…”

“A genius who could make boiled shoe leather taste like milk-fed lamb.”

“It was only a little less complicated than performing an appendectomy on  a life-raft.”

“Tears trickled like colorless blood from her eyes.”

“…without having to sort it out from their moist Germanic hissings.”

“…more than once pure bravado was all that kept us from tumbling right into the nearest ditch in a digestive coma.”

“Old judges and officers busied themselves being iportant.”

“There is an urgency, an instant beauty, about words written while they are hot in the mind.”

“…shake back their hair softly against their shoulders like sensual colts.”

“She was looking at me, insisting with her whole body that I stay.”

“She stood leaning away from me, all dropping, like the leaves on a broken branch in the hot sun. She said,’Oh,God,’ quietly.”

“I took another bath and went to bed as fast as I could. It was as if I had a rendezvous with something in my sleep. I rushed to meet it.”

“It was of adobe, one room and a wide closet and a corner hearth, and it was so heavily plastered that there were no hard corners or lines but a softness to everything under the thick whitewash, as if it were a robe to be worn, firm and protecting but with no part of it to cut or hurt or rub against.”

“…there was the sound of leaves growing, blowing, falling.”

…and often we pulled the chairbeds out to the terrace in brilliant August nights and lay naked in the silky air, watching the meteors shoot and tumble in  the pure black sky.”

“A little cloud of hurt gentelness seemed to hang in the air where she last stood.”

“She turned her back to me, like a priest taking communion.”

“…ducks, flying here and there as ducks must.”

“Men have enjoyed eating oysters since they were not much more than monkeys.”

“Beat the eggs angrily until they froth. Add the water. Season without thought. Heat oil quickly to the smoking point in a thin skillet, pour in egg mixture and stir fast. Scrape onto cold plates and slam down on a carelessly laid table.”

“She straightened her shoulders, and settled her hat with a slightly coquettish movement of gnarled arms.”

“Fishing boats dancing on the blue water and rubbing their sterns against the stone wharf.”

“Sniffed the perfume of being human.”

“…with an extra swig from my glass of courage.’

“Plum jamb as sour as Hell’s wrath.”

“A good recipe calls for one part of strong tea in the bottom of a pretty cup, and eight to ten parts of fine fresh warm milk, to be stirred by recipient with perhaps a little sugar or honey and of course politness.”

“Grandmother also believed that tea, when properly made, should be served strong enough to trot a mouse on.”

“Today is a wonderful day; really the first one of spring for me for some reason. I feel like dancing, whirling around any old way. It is astonishing and above all frightening to realize that even before I am thinking this, I know it is not possible. I couldn’t dance if I had to. Actually I feel stiff and full of aches and pains, and why not? I am past eighty years old, and more than  full of the usual woes — but I look out the window and it’s so damned beautiful that really I am dancing. In other words, I feel quiet silly today. What is even worse is that I would be willing to bet you ten cents that you’d dance too. We’d go whirling off together.”

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Now THAT’S writing!  If any of you want to take off your shoes and do some further wading with Mary Francis try “The Measure of Her Powers,” an M.F.K. Fisher reader. I’m sure it’s available at Amazon.com, or, better, used for much less, at AbeBooks. Or try your library. If they have no M.F.K. Fisher books in your library, you should consider moving to a more civilized area.                          ———–FIGHT FORTH——————————