Wednesday, July 29, 2009

First Kiss 1954

As our lips touched, I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori, and so the kissing stopped.... I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton, and in that sense it was a shocking experience.

This from Erik Langkjaer, a college textbook salesman describing the first and perhaps last kiss Flannery O'Connor received from a man.

I can remember the first time my lips touched a girl's, and blessfully, for me at least, it was nothing remotely of the order of shocking. It was quite pleasant and made sufficient impression that I wanted another. Must be why my writing is nowhere near the caliber of O'Connor's.

3 comments:

Ian Wolcott said...

That's wonderful.

Lidian said...

Presumably this was the inspiration for "Good Country People" (don't know if my first attempt at a comment worked, sorry if this is redundant!)

Anonymous said...

my first attempt at a comment worked


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