Without Lifting A Finger

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Julian Barnes: Departure(s)

January 27, 2026

But we don’t really imagine, do we, that all this authorial remembering has come from a cup of tea? Proust clearly believes in the powerful unloosing effect on our memory of taste and smell: in the second volume, À l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, he repeats that ‘The best part of our memory lies outside ourselves, in a rainy breath, in the smell of a closed-up room or the smell of the first blaze of a fire.’ But perhaps the Madeleine Incident, however true in life, should be regarded as a fictional device as much as a transcendental key. Perhaps Proust was a novelist in search of a theory to scaffold his work – which would be a very French thing.

Julian Barnes' Last Book

January 26, 2026

From Departure(s): A Novel Marcel finds that when he tries to remember Combray, only the frustrating norms of memory apply: he sees it as no more than ‘a luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background’. And he sees the same scenes again and again. This, he realises, is because they are prompted by ‘voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect’, and since ‘the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself’, he no longer has any interest in trying to ‘ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.’ But then a wonderful thing happens. One day, many years later, low in spirits, he returns home, and his adored mother, seeing that he is cold, offers him some tea, ‘a thing I did not ordinarily take’. Further, she sends out for a petite madeleine. He dips a morsel of cake into the tea and raises it to his lips in a spoon; as he tastes it, an exquisite pleasure runs through him. It is beyond gustatory; it is...

Cities of the Plain

January 23, 2026

The cushions he lay on were damp from the rain and they stank. He was very thirsty. He tried not to think. He heard a car pass in the street. He heard a dog bark. He lay with the yellow silk of his enemy’s shirt wrapped about him like a ceremonial sash gone dark with blood and he held his bloodied claw of a hand over the severed wall of his stomach. Holding himself close that he not escape from himself for he felt it over and over, that lightness that he took for his soul and which stood so tentatively at the door of his corporeal self. Like some light-footed animal that stood testing the air at the open door of a cage. He heard the distant toll of bells from the cathedral in the city and he heard his own breath soft and uncertain in the cold and the dark of the child’s playhouse in that alien land where he lay in his blood. Help me, he said. If you think I’m worth it. Amen.

Bewick's Wren (near the bottom of Burbank Peak)

January 21, 2026

My Climb to the Wisdom Tree

January 21, 2026

It'd been a semi-serious resolution for at least two years. I accomplished the climb yesterday morning. Especially on the way down, I had to talk to my knees.;) Occasionally I'd stop to shoot a bird (often quite the balancing act along the rugged trail). Perhaps the most cooperative model was a Bewick's Wren, which I saw on (and heard) on the return trip. Amazing little guy. I'll post his video separately. The only slight disappointment: the HOLLYWOOD sign (see last pic).;) *

Grey Wagtail (Sintra, Portugal)

January 16, 2026