Buttercups

I haven't much time for reading novels as of late, but I was reminded today of one of my all time favorite passages ever in a novel. Here it is, with some text chopped off on either end. If you find yourself entranced, you can read more in the The Brothers K by David James Duncan.

     I was hiking a south-sloping headland on the Strait this morning, trudging along in a funk the beautiful but long-lost cause of which chivalry demands I not name, when the sun burst out of the fog, and so did I, I guess, because all of a sudden I found myself standing so funkless that I felt naked in a huge marshy meadow just blazing with early summer buttercups. A sunlit lake of brilliant yellow, Natasha. With me grasping, nearly downing in the middle of it. And I’d scarcely noticed the coming of spring.

     The word “stunning” may describe the meadow. But not “stunning” the adjective: this yellow hit like a fist. This was Stunning the Noun. And it Its presence (odd as this may sound) Everett the Noun vanished.

Want proof that I vanished? Probably not, knowing you. But being the skeptical sort, I do. So let me mull this event over a little:

     You and I didn’t make it close enough to Spring for you to learn this about me, but I’ve never liked to pick flowers. Blossoming is a sexual activity, and anything engaged in sex ought, it seems to me, to be left alone. Yet in the lake of buttercups, the instant after I vanished, what remained in my place dripped Stunned to its knees and began, regardless of my opinion, to pick buttercups as fast as it could work its fingers. 

So good.