Without Lifting A Finger

          

I think I agree with Elizabeth B.: K.'s journals are perhaps the most readable (not that I've dared to read him all). Perhaps I'll get back to them someday, but for tonight I'm just looking for a random Hogarthian line of red (swiped many years ago when I only had "real" books!). * And the winner is: It is said that experience makes a man wise. That is a very unreasonable thing to say. If there were nothing still higher than experience, experience would make him mad.

     P.S. Have you seen Kierkegaard's Journals ? I've been reading it off and on for several months -- there are wonderful things in it and it's the first of his books I've been able to understand. And did you like the Four Quartets ?

The Fish   wade through black jade.        Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps        adjusting the ash-heaps;               opening and shutting itself like   an injured fan.        The barnacles which encrust the side        of the wave, cannot hide               there for the submerged shafts of the   sun, split like spun        glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness        into the crevices—               in and out, illuminating   the turquoise sea        of bodies. The water drives a w...

The Fish I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen --the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly-- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but sha...

The Lagoon: Always magical. Charlie and I just got back from his favorite short circuit: the bridge and back. Ebb-tide. Patches of slime in slanting light. The return of the jellies (just babies). *                               

Read her poetry years ago and liked much of it. Picked up both her poems and letters ( ONE ART ) via Kindle. Didn't know about the connection between her and Marianne Moore. Am jumping between Bishop and Boswell. * Excerpt (from a letter to Marianne Moore) from ONE ART:      I cannot imagine why I left without leaving you the picture of the Temple of Paestrum. I often become slightly confused at the very point of bestowal and feel that perhaps, after all, it is inadequate or unwanted -- but I'm sure I thought you admired the Temple as much as I did! I am glad that you liked the leaves and I do hope they arrived wearing something of the original coloring. They fade fairly slowly, but they do fade. It was a "Sea Grape" ...  I am enclosing another -- the front side is yellow marked with a marvelous blurred (as if done on blotting paper) cerise, at the moment, I'm afraid it will be faded, but you will still be able to see the peculiar linings ...



        

Rachel Chiesley , usually known as Lady Grange (1679–1745), was the wife of Lord Grange , a Scottish lawyer with Jacobite sympathies. After 25 years of marriage and nine children, the Granges separated acrimoniously. When Lady Grange produced letters that she claimed were evidence of his treasonable plottings against the Hanoverian government in London, her husband had her kidnapped in 1732. She was incarcerated in various remote locations on the western seaboard of Scotland, including the Monach Isles , Skye and the distant islands of St Kilda . Lady Grange's father was convicted of murder and she is known to have had a violent temper; initially her absence seems to have caused little comment. News of her plight eventually reached her home town of Edinburgh however, and an unsuccessful rescue attempt was undertaken by her lawyer, Thomas Hope of Rankeillor. She died in captivity, after being in effect imprisoned for 13 years. Her life has been remembered in poetry, prose an...

Excerpt from Boswell's Journal: After dinner to-day, we talked of the extraordinary fact of Lady Grange's being sent to St Kilda, and confined there for several years, without any means of relief. [Footnote: The true story of this lady, which happened in this century, is as frightfully romantick as if it had been the fiction of a gloomy fancy. She was the wife of the Lords of Session in Scotland, a man of the very first blood of his country. For some mysterious reasons, which have never been discovered, she was seized and carried off in the dark, she knew not by whom, and by nightly journies was conveyed to the Highland shores, from whence she was transported by sea to the remote rock of St Kilda, where she remained, amongst its few wild inhabitants, a forlorn prisoner, but had a constant supply of provisions, and a woman to wait on her. No inquiry was made after her, till she at last found means to convey a letter to a confidential friend, by the daughter of a Catechist who...

Though nothing's 100%, I'm already dreaming about Scotland. Already there in Boswellian time (Johnson is getting too cozy in Dunvegan Castle). Hoping to see De Quincey (in situ) and a few other sights (see below). Nota Bene: None of these photos are mine. All hail from Wikipedia. If it happens, of course I'll have pics of my own. ***   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portree           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunvegan_Castle           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenfinnan_Viaduct     

William Drummond (13 December 1585 – 4 December 1649), called " of Hawthornden ", was a Scottish poet. Works Drummond's most important works are the Cypresse Grove and the poems. The Cypresse Grove exhibits great wealth of illustration, and an extraordinary command of musical English. It is an essay on the folly of the fear of death. "This globe of the earth," says he, "which seemeth huge to us, in respect of the universe, and compared with that wide pavilion of heaven; is less than little, of no sensible quantity, and but as a point." This is one of Drummond's favourite moods; and he uses constantly in his poems such phrases as "the All," "this great All." Even in such of his poems as may be called more distinctively Christian , this philosophic conception is at work. [ 4 ] A noteworthy feature in Drummond's poetry, as in that of his courtier contemporaries Aytoun , Lord Stirling and others, is that it manifests no...

Excerpt from Boswell's journal (trip to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson): We spoke of death. Dr. Johnson on this subject observed, that the boastings of some men, as to dying easily, were idle talk, proceeding from partial views. I mentioned Hawthornden's Cypress Grove, where it is said that the world is a mere show; and that it is unreasonable for a man to wish to continue in the show-room, after he has seen it. Let him go cheerfully out, and give place to other spectators. JOHNSON. 'Yes, sir, if he is sure he is to be well, after he goes out of it. But if he is to grow blind after he goes out of the show-room, and never to see any thing again; or if he does not know whither he is to go next, a man will not go cheerfully out of a show-room. No wise man will be contented to die, if he thinks he is to go into a state of punishment. Nay, no wise man will be contented to die, if he thinks he is to fall into annihilation: for however unhappy any man's existence may be, ...

Still fighting a bad cold, but I couldn't sleep and I had to get out and walk. Read some (Boswell and Johnson in the Hebrides) at the Sunset Beach Starbucks. Walked for a short while along the beach. Seems a marathon was going on. *                   

Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [ O.S. 7 September]  – 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson , was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer . Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory , and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". [1] He is also the subject of "the most famous single biographical work in the whole of literature," James Boswell 's Life of Samuel Johnson . [2] Born in Lichfield , Staffordshire, Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher he moved to London, where he began to write for The Gentleman's Magazine . His early works include the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage , the poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes , and the play Irene . After nine y...

Picked up (downloaded) Boswell's account of B & J's trip to the Hebrides (thought it might be fun to read before I go to Scotland in the summer -- nothing certain yet, and I certainly don't know if I'll have the chance to travel so far afield). Enjoying the read thus far. *** James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck ( / ˈ b ɒ z ˌ w ɛ l , - w ə l / ; 29 October 1740 – 19 May 1795), was a Scottish biographer and diarist, born in Edinburgh . He is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson , which the modern Johnsonian critic Harold Bloom has claimed is the greatest biography written in the English language. Boswell's surname has passed into the English language as a term ( Boswell , Boswellian , Boswellism ) for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print. In A Scandal in Bohemia , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's character Sherlock Holmes affect...