Munificence

munificence

n : liberality in bestowing gifts; extremely liberal and generous of spirit [syn: largess, largesse, magnanimity, openhandedness]

I just now learned this word. I'm quite busy not learning Japanese words, but I looked up this here 'munificence' on dictionary.com. Why? Because of Margaret Atwood. I likes me my Margaret Atwood. This is a new discovery for me. I mean, I'm sure I've liked her for years now, it's just that I haven't picked up any of her books until about a month ago. That book was Wilderness Tips, a collection of short stories. Short stories about women mainly. Depressing mainly. The happiest story ended with a slightly older than middle age woman crying in her bathroom during the Christmas holidays. Yet I loved every sentence of it. Maybe not every sentence. But there were perfect sentences in there. Sentences that made me stop reading, just so I could grin and drink them in again. Sentences that a trillion monkeys on a whole lot of really nice typewriters would have a hard time topping.

I don't own Wilderness Tips, so I can't quote any of those sentences, but I am right now reading 'The Blind Assassin' and loving it even more. I''m less than 50 pages in, but man am I digging it. Somehow has made put me right inside the head of an elderly woman. Which is not somewhere I ever thought I would be.

(on the subject of her thinning hair)
"Beneath it there are glimpses of scalp, the greyish pink of mice feet.
If I ever get caught in a high wind my hair will blow off like dandelion
fluff, leaving only a tiny pockmarked nubbin of bald head."

That's just good stuff.

Makes me feel even more crap about my own writing, but whatever. I am so disenchanted with my own abilities at the moment, that I couldn't even muster any energy to even attempt to imply that Atwood is, like, totally munificent for sharing her words with the world.