Opening statements: Intelligent Life in the Universe

Some people love poetry; some love music; others are dazzled by fireworks going off in the summer sky. 

Why we love these things, for each person who loves them,  likely there is a different explanation.  For some,  it's the sheer delight in the flash; for others it wells up from an appreciation of how hard it is to do: poetry, music, pyrotechnics, whatever. 

For me, it's opening line, whether in a bar or a novel, that is the most difficult thing of all. How do you approach someone you do not know and begin a conversation?  Now consider the problem of approaching that person without being able to see him or her, without knowing anything about them, what they look like, where they came from, what they believe in. You are just talking to the dark theater and you cannot see beyond the stage, blinded as you are by the spot lights.

I am not the only one to be dazzled by this peculiar virtuosity. There is a well known game, "Guess the book," from opening lines.  It's an easy game, if you've actually read those books, because those lines are indelible. 

But what kind of mind can write those lines?

I have five, of many, which come to mind.  Intriguingly, only one is written by a man, the rest come from women.  I like each for different reasons.

Here they are, for no particular reason, in no particular order:

#1  In the later summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

#2  It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers -- goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.--Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

#3 How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, "This is the place to start; there can be no other." But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names--Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakuru. There are easily a hundred names, and I can begin best by choosing one of them--not because it is first nor of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because here it happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance--revisitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart." "--Beryl Markham, West With the Night.

#4  WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask. Another example, one which springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pygmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable since; I never ask about snakes. Why should a Shalimar attract kraits. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not any more." --Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays.

#5 Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, and an unchartered season which lives until winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged-edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening." --Grace Metalious, Peyton Place.

In these days, when we have to listen to inanities from the mouths of politicians, trying to appeal to unseen audiences, talking down to the lowest common denominator, these minds, these words wash over The Phantom as a healing balm. There is, or was once, intelligent life in the universe.