Finding the extraordinary
I’m looking for something special. Around me are the hills of Grasmere and I have my nose in a dusty old bookshop that rarely discounts, barely organises and never, ever, sells stamps.
The hills ought to be enough. Their splendour is clear and painters and poets could lead me by the hand through every life, every unique life, which has been caught in their shadow.
Instead I turn to another country as a book by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame) shows me not the majestic beauty of Wordsworth but the ordinary lives of a tiny collection of people in a Swedish hamlet. And it is this sense of the ordinary that most captivates me because it is something I strive for whenever I write or whenever I start my working day.
Take this sentence:
People woke up late because there was no longer any morning.
How ordinary. How extraordinary. In context it is a simple sentence relating the behaviour of people caught in the long darkness of winter. This is Sweden, remember. A simple sentence gives us a simple behaviour and a complex insight into the people who exhibit it.
From the ordinary activity of sleeping in late to the extraordinary people who do so, there is always something more in every detail.
We just need to find it.