just copying

My travesty of the day, a pastiche from the early part of "Gilead" with apologies to Maryilynne Robinson, author of this quiet, spiritual tale


"Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it. For me writing has always felt like praying. You feel that you are with someone. Sifting through my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word "just". I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughted--when it's used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified by that word "just" that proper language won't acknowledge. "