I want to model better for students the fact that I'm always on the lookout for creative writing -- writing that draws my attention as a reader, that says things well, that uses meaningful syntax.
[Anasazi cliff dwellings]
Whether or not they meant to do so, the ancients had built here a lasting monument to their fugitive civilization. From a single piece of wood, Barlow was later able to retrieve a radiocarbon date. The stunning double granary, it turns out, was built before Shakespeare lived, before Giotto painted, before church choirs intoned their plainsong. The wood sample gave a date of around 1000 AD.
-David Roberts "Limits of the Known" (101) "suspense" before the reveal; use of carefully-chosen concrete comparisons to bring a thing to life (not just "old things" but "Old art"
Yet a CT scan after three Pembro infusions revealed that the nodules had stopped growing. It was no proof that the Pembro was working, but it gave me hope.
Not hope of curing cancer -- for the rest of my life, however long or short, I must live with the mindless proliferating cells that have made my body their home -- but hope that I might forestall the brutal end.
Hope that someday, with or without a feeding tube or a cap on my liquid intake, I might hike again, and camp out under the changeless stars, and even climb easy routes. Hope that I still have months or years to write, to reassess what the first seventy-three years of my life have meant, and to squeeze new meaning from all that I had and had not done, before it was too late to remember or even know.
-David Roberts "Limits of the Known" (132) repetition & intentional fragment
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