This Being the Beginning Month of the Year

There will always be beginnings. They may come like thunder. Or they may just whiff by without flourish or flame. Either way, beginnings impress. In books and manuscripts, they are crucial.

In the beginning was the Word, so starts the Book of John, my personal best beginning line in the Bible.

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, Dylan Thomas in Under Milk Wood began.

And how fascinating it was to start learning how to read and to always begin mouthing the reassuringly mysterious Once upon a time…

Hundreds of classic stories and novels have beginnings that have been immortalized. Charles Dickens’s first one-sentence paragraph in A Tale of Two Cities is one of the most quoted lines in literature.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way?in short, the period was so.

Such irresistible beginning of a story is matched only by the ending lines. But endings I don’t intend to tackle just yet, this being the beginning month of the year.

About two centuries earlier, the pioneer of the novel, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra of Spain, wrote Don Quixote.  It starts thus:  Somewhere in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived a little while ago one of those gentlemen who are wont to keep a lance in the rack, an old buckler, a lean horse and a swift greyhound.

Across the English Channel where a famous Gothic cathedral stands came The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo.  It was three hundred forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today that the citizens of Paris were awakened by the pealing of all the bells in the triple precincts of the City, the University, and the Town. Thus began the story of Quasimodo.

From Russia, with or without love, came Anna Karenina.  Leo Tolstoy’s massive novel always makes me smile in remembrance.  And it’s not because it could knock an ordinary mortal down if it’s thrown ante mano.  I once used it, as an erstwhile World Literature teacher, for a special reading report of lethargic students whom I tested with questions needing answers not found in Cliff’s Notes. The novel’s beginning sentence is a classic. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

A more contemporary Russian, Vladimir Nabokov, sowed a literary whirlwind with his seminal Lolita, which starts: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Much earlier, Dante Alighieri began the Inferno part of his immortal The Divine Comedy with: Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.

Nobel prizewinner Gunter Grass of Germany, in the opening line of his famed The Tin Drum, writes:  Granted:  I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight…

Some beginnings impress with their brevity. Call me Ishmael. (Moby Dick, Herman Melville)  It was love at first sight. (Catch-22, Joseph Heller)  I am an invisible man. (Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison)  All this happened, more or less. (Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut)  For a long time, I went to bed early. (Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust)  They shoot the white girl first. (Paradise, Toni Morrison)  The primroses were over. (Watership Down, Richard Adams)  Mother died today. (The Stranger, Albert Camus)  All children, except one, grow up. (Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie)

A screaming comes across the sky, the beginning line in Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, is impressive for its imagery and alliteration. Just as striking in imagery is this first line in Neuromancer by William Gibson:  The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

And there’s this book about an orphan boy forced to live on the streets where he became feral. Its beginning line and undertones gave me goosebumps: I was once a human being.

(6 Jan 2008)