Send Message: Big-Time

In my neighborhood thrift shop, clothes are grouped, not by size, but by color. So it takes a while to shop, but the gradations of yellow to orange, etc. are mouth-wateringly appealing.

I was taking my weekly wander-through recently and the print skirts section seized my eye. Here's the one I bought: pansies made large. Even the modest little face of the pansy can be monumental.

When you want to go bold, super-sizing is the no-brainer of techniques. And it's oddly easy to forget the no-brainer.

I did some research once on how to write about the sacred. Theologian Rudolf Otto in his book The Idea of the Holy suggested that among other things, making a symbol big is a good start toward representing the holy.

I was doing that research in order to give a lecture on Moby Dick at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India. I wound up writing my novel, Sister India, which I was researching on that trip, about a woman who weighs over four hundred pounds.

I didn't set out to do that. It was the Ganges I was thinking about as the sacred in the novel, and certainly it is large. I wound up with a character on the same scale. Obviously, Otto got his message across.


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