Merlin celebrates writing:
…I clearly remember reading that first line of *Absalom, Absalom!* in 1988 and thinking, “Holy shit, I need to sit the fuck down, turn off The Smiths, and *just read this book*.”
I didn’t think about this for more than five second, but I didn’t have to either. Here’s a paragraph not so much written as shouted from the depths of Limbo:
“You bad woman!” I shout back, while she, turning into the shop, half-contemptuous, half-reassured, flourishes her fist in the air. “You bad woman! I begged you for a shovelful of the worst coal and you would not give it me.” And with that I ascend into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost forever.
It’s from the scariest story I know, Kafka’s The Bucket Rider.
Might I humbly add a paragraph from T. Coraghessan Boyle’s East is East that stopped me in my tracks:
VAST AND PRIMEVAL, UNFATHOMABLE, UNCONQUERABLE, BASTION of cottonmouth, rattlesnake and leech, mother of vegetation, father of mosquito, soul of silt, the Okefenokee is the swamp archetypal, the swamp of legend, of racial memory, of Hollywood. It gives birth to two rivers, the St. Mary’s and the Suwannee, fanning out over 430,000 leaf-choked acres, every last one as sodden as a sponge. Four hundred and thirty thousand acres of stinging, biting and boring insects, of maiden cane and gum and cypress, of palmetto, slash pine and peat, of muck, mud, slime and ooze. Things fester here, things cook down, decompose, deliquesce. The swamp is home to two hundred and twenty-five species of birds, forty-three of mammals, fifty-eight of reptiles, thirty-two of amphibians and thirty-four of fish-all variously equipped with beaks, talons, claws, teeth, stingers and fangs–not to mention the seething galaxies of gnats and deerflies and no-see-ums, the ticks, mites, hookworms and paramecia that exist only to compound the misery of life. There are alligators here, bears, puma, bobcats and bowfin, there are cooters and snappers, opossum, coon and gar. They feed on one another, shit and piss in the trees, in the sludge and muck and on the floating mats of peat, they dribble jism and bury eggs, they scratch and stink and sniff at themselves, caterwauling and screeching through every minute of every day and night till the place reverberates like some hellish zoo.
Lemkin 