5/20/2023 0 Comments Novel red clocks![]() ![]() What difference does it make, this hole in the language? The word bachelor evokes freedom, independence, and sexual license, yet English has no term for a woman fulfilled in her solo life. They crouched like feeble gargoyles on the narrative margins, their lives undeserving, it seemed, of real attention. I grew up reading novels in which spinster characters were pitied or ignored. ![]() ![]() Spinster, freighted with its dreary connotations-dried-up, lonely, sexless, failed-didn’t come close. A word for a woman who lives happily on her own, without a spouse or children who is passionate about work, art, sex, friendship, care-giving, politics who is fully and fiercely alive. One became a wife and mother, the other became-what? I remember looking for a word that didn’t exist, at least not in any language I knew. Years ago I wrote a story about two sisters. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. It is a vital necessity of our existence. ![]()
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