Words fall off and roll out of sight…

Reading time: Less than 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a simile from Hilma Wolitzer…

The book, A Story Larger Than My Own, edited by Janet Burroway, carries the intriguing subtitle: Women Writers Look Back on Their Lives and Careers. A collection of essays  by a group of women who came of age during the midcentury feminist movement, the book includes works by Jane Smiley, Erica Jong and the late poet Maxine Kumin.

I found some of the chapters slightly disappointing — focusing on ideas that were too small or picayune or details too inconsequential…

But one essay stood out. Titled “What I Know” and written by American novelist Hilma Wolitzer (mother of the contemporary novelist Meg Wolitzer) it captured the frustrations of aging in clear, evocative language. Here is my favourite simile that she used:

Time is sharply finite, and language isn’t at your fingertips anymore. Words fall off and roll out of sight like loose buttons.

I am just old enough to have owned my own “button box” when I was young teen and to have been concerned by keeping and reusing old buttons (something my own children would never do today.) Perhaps that’s why this simile spoke to me so deeply.

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