What the Delivery Guy Heard

When I opened the door, the pizza guy looked at me for a moment and said, A classics fan, huh? I blinked, took the box, and set it down next to the plate of charred potatoes that had made ordering pizza necessary in the first place.

Not classical music. The 2005 Pride & Prejudice adaptation had been running in the background while I was supposedly cooking—Keira Knightley doing her particular barely-restrained Elizabeth Bennet—which explains both his comment and the state of the potatoes. There’s something about that film’s language. The screenplay stays close enough to Austen’s rhythms that you catch yourself actually listening, and then things burn.

It makes you aware of how much gets lost in ordinary expression. Not a sentimental complaint—just the plain observation that there was once a mode of writing where word choice was treated as craft, where sentences were built to do something to a person rather than just deliver information. Not the forced, airless poetry from school, the dreary stuff that made you associate the word "poetic" with punishment. Something more honest: words chosen carefully because someone believed the right word in the right place could move another human being, could catch them off guard and land somewhere real.

I want to hold onto at least a piece of that.

Better get to bed before whatever was on that pizza wears off and I reread this and cringe. The delivery guy was right, though. Apparently I am some kind of classics fan.