Prompt 41: In Here Are Secrets
I've been reading Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, which, if you haven't read it by all means do so at your earliest convenience. It is funny and absorbing and smart and full of life. The narrator is a dry young aspiring novelist named Fleur Talbot. The following passage is from early in the book. Fleur has just gotten a job as the assistant or secretary for a mysterious society, and her new boss Sir Quentin is introducing her to the work she'll be doing.
He waved toward a large antique cabinet. "In there," he said, "are secrets."
I wasn't alarmed, for although he was plainly some kind of crank and it struck me, of course, that he might be up to no good, there was nothing in his voice or manner that I felt as an immediate personal menace. But I was on the alert, in fact excited. The novel I was writing, my first, Warrender Chase, was really filling my whole life at that time. I was finding it extraordinary how, throughout all the period I had been working on the novel, right from Chapter One, characters and situations, images and phrases that I absolutely needed for the book simply appeared as if from nowhere into my range of perception. Not that I reproduced them photographically and literally. I didn't for a moment think of portraying Sir Quentin as he was. What gave me great happiness was his gift to me of the finger-tips of his hands touching each other, and, nestling among the words, as he waved towards the cabinet, "In there are secrets," the pulsating notion of how much he wanted to impress, how greatly he desired to believe in himself. And I might have left the job then and there, and never seen or thought of him again, but carried away with me these two items and more. I felt like the walnut cabinet itself towards which he was waving. In here are secrets, said my mind.
Your prompt for this week (or what's left of it) is to approach the world around you in the spirit of Fleur. Take in the compelling details around you like gifts. Think of your mind as a walnut cabinet of secrets. If you stay open to the "characters and situations, images and phrases that [you] absolutely need," they will "simply appear as if from nowhere into [your] range of perception."