It’s 6:30 AM on a Tuesday.
The sun has yet to rise. I’m sitting at my laptop, working on a client document.
Clara is across the room, eating Cheerios and reading a book. She says, “Wow.”
“What?” I ask.
She tells me she’s reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” and has just read a fantastic sentence.
“Read it to me,” I ask.
“Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
I’m impressed.
Not only is it an excellent sentence, but she’s chosen a famous sentence — a sentence recognized as one of the best in the novel and one of Jackson’s very best.
And Shirley Jackson is a brilliant author — someone I read in college repeatedly — and “The Haunting of Hill House” is considered a masterpiece. In addition to this novel, Jackson wrote such classics as the short story “The Lottery” and the novel ” We Have Always Lived in the Castle.”
She’s a serious customer.
Best of all, Clara is reading the book for fun. No one told her to read this 1959 classic. She’s just a reader who loves good books.
More than 25 years ago, I sat in my English classes at Trinity College and had conversations like this with future novelists, poets, and professors of literature,
Maybe a few human resources coordinators, product marketers, and public relations specialists, too.
Not every dream comes true.
But more than a quarter century later, I find myself in a similar conversation with my teenage daughter in the wee hours of the morning.
It’s pretty amazing.
Some things could never be predicted.
