I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.” These are the words of T S Eliot in his poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

They are perceptive words, causing readers to think of times when their own greatness or that of someone they knew flickered.

Everyone has moments of self-doubt and second-guessing. When they read such a line, they may say, “Oh, now I see!” This happens when we are suddenly moved, like when a character’s experiences intersect with our own or those of people we know.

Indeed, good fiction is full of “Oh, now I see” moments. To create such moments, the writing has to be like a symphony with different sections of string, brass, woodwind and percussion instruments.

Just like music, which makes one want to dance and move to the beat, good literature can take us to an “aha” moment when the events or characters jump off the page. There could be many “aha” moments in a novel, poem or short story.

English critic James Wood writes that, in the novel Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, an “aha” moment happens when Stephen Dedalus hears his father sing an old song.

He writes, “The tender tremors with which his father’s voice festooned the strange sad happy air,” and then his father cries out, “Ah, but you should have heard Mick Lucy sing it! Poor Mick Lucy! He had little turns for it, grace notes he used to put in that I haven’t got.” Wood continues, “Then we are suddenly moved, sometimes to tears, as we identify with the old man’s loss and we remember the many times we have been told, ‘Oh, you should have heard him or her sing it!’”

In his novel The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway writes about a Cuban fisherman (the Old Man), getting on in years and running out of luck. One of the “aha” moments a reader could identify with is when the Old Man is talking to a boy he taught how to fish.

The boy’s parents warn him to leave the Old Man alone. The Old Man observes, “The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish,” probably alluding to the fact that old age is difficult for all.

The reader imagines (they probably know one or two forlorn old people) what happens in old age. Maybe an ageing father or mother is inconsolable after their spouse dies, and the house is an empty nest as the children have grown up and left. The Old Man still hopes to repair and rebuild his life, to restore what he has lost. He says, “My big fish must be somewhere,” as he climbs back into his boat to go fishing.

Another “aha” moment is when renowned Zimbabwean writer Charles Mungoshi, in his short story Coming of the Dry Season, writes, “One Wednesday, Moab Gwati received a letter from Rusape. His mother was seriously ill. He decided to wait till he got his pay on Friday: Saturday he would go home.
He was paid on Friday afternoon, and, as always happened with his money, it seemed to fly in all directions.”

When the writer describes how, after payday, Moab’s money “flew in all directions,” a reader living in a city and earning a low income can relate to it straight away.

For those who grew up in the village, where goats, chicken and sheep shared rooms with us, Elechi Amadi’s novel The Concubine summons up a familiar scene about a straying goat that “witnesses” a very serious conversation when a son decides to marry a woman against the wishes of his parents.

Amadi writes, “For some time, mother and son sat motionless in the small room. The sun sent two straight red shafts through holes in the roof. Outside, a black and white goat, heavy with child, sauntered across. It stopped by the doorway, looked intently at the pair of unhappy human beings inside and moved on to forage for food.”

The scene would remind some readers of that peculiar habit of animals — stopping in the middle of their foraging to look the shepherd straight in the eye as if sympathising with his miserable work — before they continue rummaging.

Readers who know one or two misers could identify with John Steinbeck’s, East of Eden, where a rich miser named Charles is described: “Charles never spent a dime. He pinched a dollar until the eagle screamed.”

The writer is the CEO of Phoenix Publishers.
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