The Sketch Book
Among the books I have read this year, the Sketch book, by Washington Irving, is
the one that gave me the most spiritual felicity and contemplation. The writerhimself is also among the best writers of essays I have come across up so far.
“You may imitate Washington Irving’s essays in order to hone your English writing skills”.—Someone once said so. It is hearsay, but in a way doesn’t it prove that the writings of his have sparkling elements to emulate?
Though personally I didn’t choose to do so,but I did arrange pages of notes upon the book, some related to vocabulary, some lines that impressed me and involved musing afterwards. It is beneficial to accumulate, if you are a language geek
as I am, the vocabulary you may put into use in your writing, as one of the tricky aspects about vocabulary building is “use it or lost it”. Such words as aquiline, debility, disheveled, impetuous, extemporaneous, palliative, clandestine,
ecumenical, to name a few, all found their due place in the writer’s writing,
which make learning them by heart really much easier.
About lines that impressed me,the book was replete with ones of that kind. It collected essays mostly written during the time when the writer was meandering among the European countries. Except for Legend of Sleep Hollow and Rip Van Wrinkle, which are novels, almost all the essays were travelogues, in which the writer
delineated with meticulous care what he saw, felt, thought and his rambling associations congenial to the environs.
Checking through my notebook, the part as follows was found: There are certain
half-dreaming moods of minds, in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt, where we may indulge our reveries and build our
castles undisturbed.—I found similarity in my own life to the writer’s. Thanks
to his delineation such moments in the past, warming into a flow, came back to
me, and enabled me to ponder upon those once rattling thoughts in hindsight.
Another random-picked one: But the morning was extremely frosty, the light vapor
of the proceeding evening had been precipitated by the cold, and covered all the trees and every blade of glass with its fine crystallizations. The rays of a bright morning sun had a dazzling effect among the glittering foliage. –if you had the experience of waking up in a chilly later autumn morning, or simply if you had watched the Pride and Prejudice of 1995 version, then your feeling would certainly resonate with the writer’s description of the scenery.
Reading these two quotations, if you reckon hence that the writer was indulged only in inner contemplation and scenery depict, then you would miss the point. Quite a few essays in the book concerned far beyond that. One example is one essay
titled as Traits of Indian Character, which to some extent made up my ignorance
of history. Apart from that, in the article there was one part, in which the writer gave his viewpoints of Indian clans, striking me quite a lot.
The following is what he wrote: They (Indian clans) resembled those wild plants,
which thrive best in the clades of the forest, but shrink from the hand of cultivation and perish between the influences of the sun.-- Believe it or not, when
reading the article, what came to my mind was nothing but the image of farmers
around, which somewhat has been embroidered with that of the city I stay in.
For those farmers, staying at their born place, they might have had a content life with a respectable air; but here in the sprawling metropolis, they seem so out of place and can not get a whit of due respect or attention. Should they be encouraged back to the places they were in? That’s probably the question that slipped most people's mind but no one might give a pleasing answer.
In general, this book should be worth reading. And I don’t think I have esteemed this book too high or have given it too much credit. My approbation was truthfully stated and based upon what I personally benefited from the book: It not merely struck me and sufficed my imagination with its munificent depicts of countryside scenery and customs, but also, practically, enlarged my storage of vocabulary and improved my reading ability to appreciate masterpieces of the kind.
