If I were a sculptor, to complete this task I would carve the Parthenon in a grain of rice. Or better yet, carve the Reichstag one inch high, wrapped as Christos wrapped it. If I were a painter, I'd use a microscope and paint a teeny picture of Chuck Close. And make a beautiful frame for it, with a tiny hook to hang it. But since words are the only medium I understand at all, what would it mean to make a scale model of a work of art? How about a haiku of a book?

I came upon this idea while driving to the car dealership for a tune-up. I was so lost in thought that I missed my exit. It struck me that something tragic would be easiest to summarize and best suited to a haiku. Virginia Woolf's book Mrs. Dalloway has always been a favorite, and I've been thinking about rereading it since reading Michael Cunningham's wonderful modern version, The Hours.

The free e-text of the original I found has some errors but clocks in at a bit over 64,000 words. Two orders of magnitude smaller would be 640 words. So my 11 words are about 3.5 orders of magnitude shorter. Here it is:

Mrs. Dalloway

social graces chafe
invitations and flowers
I quit and am free