Interesting exercise

W

ell, I didn't accomplish as much as I wanted this weekend. I guess, just knowing that it's Spring Break allowed me to take it easy a bit. Instead, I just bummed around watching TV, did a bit of exercise and--I'm sure some of you may not believe this--even went for a beer on Saturday night, something I haven't done in about a month!

I also visited the site of a student and found this exercise.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your own bulletin...along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

Well, I tried it and this is what I got:

A sentence impregnated with images extends the borders of the reader's imagination, because it is not intellectualized.

--Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho, p. 123, sentence 5.

An insightful quote for the writers among us, made all the more interesting given the randomness of the exercise. Well, maybe not that random. I have at least 50 book at arm's length from where I sit in front of my computer--these are the top three shelves of the books to my left--so I reached for the closest book that wasn't a dictionary, a text book on grammar, or a book written in Japanese.

If you try the exercise, let me know what you get...