A Passage to Excitement!

I took a small vacation this week, and, since the concert I had planned to see in North Carolina was canceled, spent the time reading A Passage to India. It’s a good book, and I like E.M. Forster very much, but just now as I was coming to its end something alarming happened. For reasons I can’t explain I began to imagine that every sentence ended in an exclamation point. Accordingly, the voice in my mind’s ear that pronounced the words, a voice that had been decent, wise and insightful until this point, suddenly turned into that of an anchor on Entertainment Tonight.

A slim, tall eight-sided building stood at the top of the slope, among some bushes! This was the Shrine of the Head! It had not been roofed, and was indeed merely a screen! Inside it crouched a humble dome, and inside that, visible through a grille, was a truncated gravestone, swathed in calico!

This is too good a book to be marred by such insanity, and I am going to take a walk, perhaps gas up my car (if my bank account will permit) and come back later when, hopefully, I can resume reading with the punctuation that Mr. Forster intended.