Appropriated To Her Being

At first she thought the writing would be easy.  She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath.  She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written.  She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory.  She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.”  She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”  She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet.  And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo.  These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense;  it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience.  She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being.
But to write!  She discovered that was something else again.
—    Navarre Scott Momaday
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On This Day In:
2019	All In Good Time
	Day 13: Pause & Resume
	Ghrelin And Leptin
2018	Gratitude And Warmth
	Remembering Loss, Sacrifice And Service
	Making Little Ones Out Of Bigger Ones
2017	Never Forget
2016	It’s All Greek To Me (Well, Latin Actually)
2015	Truism
2014	Thank You
2013	Really
2012	Ordinary Five Minutes Longer
2011	The Wealth Of Sons (And Daughters)

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