September 22, 2007

I have to hope

~Before I could say anything, she declared, ‘Personally, I have an ignorance towards books. Don’t ask me nothing about books. I only read magazines.’
‘I write for magazines,’ I said at once. ‘That’s my job.’
‘Kidding me,’ said Mrs. Shaw. ‘What ones?’
I hoped I wouldn’t lose cachet by showing her. I have an unfiled heap of them on one of the counters right there in the kitchen, where they sit like beached jetsam above a swill of more mobile rubbish.
…[I]t pleases me to know that, technically speaking, ‘jetsam’ is the matter you throw out of a ship when you’re afraid it’s going to sink, whereas, if the ship sinks anyway and is destroyed by the tides, ‘flotsam’ is the debris of the smashed vessel itself.
I have to hope my work is jetsam.~
Rebecca Gowers, When to Walk