Without Lifting A Finger

I do not think Mrs Ashbury had any idea what distant fields the seed she collected might one day fall on, any more than Catherine and her two sisters Clarissa and Christina knew why they spent several hours every day in one of the north-facing rooms, where they had stored great quantities of remnant fabrics, sewing multi-coloured pillowcases, counterpanes and similar items. Like giant children under an evil spell, the three unmarried daughters, much of an age, sat on the floor amidst these mountains of material, working away and only rarely breathing a word to each other. The movement they made as they drew the thread sideways and upwards with every stitch reminded me of things that were so far back in the past that I felt my heart sink at the thought of how little time now remained. On one occasion Clarissa told me that she and her sisters had once intended to start an interior decorating business, but the plan came to nothing, she said, both because of their inexperience and because ...

Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one’s gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circus-like structure. This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted his...

In February 1890, twelve years after his arrival in Lowestoft and fifteen years after his departure from the station at Cracow, Korzeniowski, who now had British citizenship and his captain’s papers and had seen the most far-flung regions of the earth, returned for the first time to Kazimierówka and the house of his Uncle Tadeusz. In a note written much later he described his arrival at the Ukrainian station after brief stops in Berlin, Warsaw and Lublin. There his uncle’s coachman and majordomo were waiting for him in a sleigh to which four duns were harnessed but which was so small that it almost looked like a toy. The ride to Kazimierówka took another eight hours. The majordomo wrapped me up solicitously, writes Korzeniowski, in a bearskin coat that reached to the tips of my toes and put an enormous fur hat with ear flaps on my head, before taking his seat beside me. When the sleigh started off, to a soft and even jingle of bells, a winter journey back into childhood began for me. T...

I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

Three or four miles south of Lowestoft the coastline curves gently into the land. From the footpath that runs along the grassy dunes and low cliffs one can see, at any time of the day or night and at any time of the year, as I have often found, all manner of tent-like shelters made of poles and cordage, sailcloth and oilskin, along the pebble beach. They are strung out in a long line on the margin of the sea, at regular intervals. It is as if the last stragglers of some nomadic people had settled there,

The view on the water that day extended hardly farther than 300 meters until suddenly it was like a curtain falling from its rod in heavy folds. Milliquet came back with the glass and the carafe, Rouge kept quiet. Milliquet stared through the window at the cheerless curtains of fog which came across the lake one after the other, like a hand was bringing them and arranging them along a hanging rod;—eventually a question was asked behind his back (it took Rouge a long time to ask it). “And otherwise?” Milliquet looked at Rouge over his shoulder. “I mean, how does she look like?” “I couldn’t say.” That was all. At six o’clock, Milliquet had the serving girl bring her some coffee with milk; she didn’t show herself the entire day. When it was dark, Milliquet went to look from the terrace whether there was any light on in her room; he saw there was none. And no one heard the slightest sound, even though the planking in her room was simple pine without a carpet and the room where Mr. and Mrs....

Stumbled on this little novel in stumbling around a city I've not yet been too.;) Excerpt: Before going out, Hugues waited until she had put the furniture back, checking that everything dear to him was undamaged and in its right place. Then, reassured, with the doors and shutters closed, he set out on his usual twilight walk, even though the heavy drizzle, common in late autumn, did not stop, fine rain, tears falling vertically, weaving moisture, sewing down the air, setting the smooth surface of the canals abristle with needles, capturing and transfixing the soul, like a bird, in the interminable meshes of a watery net!

Of course, though Paris is always a thrill, we were aiming for Lisbon & Sintra (another box to tick). And we could only get there (barely made it;)) via Paris.

I guess I put plenty Paris pics on Instagram but nothing here. It's not too late.;)💗

  Plan to turn crucible of industrial revolution into 'international quality' museum gets funding boost. Merthyr Tyrfil * From a letter from Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson: I was in Wales, as well as Scotland, during Autumn time; lived three weeks within wind of St. Germanus’s old “College” (Fourteen Hundred years of age or so) and also not far from Merthyr Tydvil, Cyclops’ Hell, sootiest and horridest avatar of the Industrial Mammon I had ever anywhere seen; ... * The History of Merthyr Tydfil - The Town of Steel. Methyr Tyrfil -- Town of Steel

We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud “electricity,” and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, — for we have no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah me — what could the wild man know o...

Emerson to Carlyle: I read with interest what you say of the political omens in England. I could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. But government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. We have had in different parts of the country mobs and moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have betrayed an almost godless state of society; so that I begin to think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may. There is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that I could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love of life too strong in him.

Carlyle to Emerson: One more juicy bit (for today): What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most monstrous “tissue,” this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from “that roaring Loom of Time,” — miraculous ever as of old!

Might've been injured in the recent storm. He was sitting on the sand (in a curious position) and when I approached him he "hobbled" to the water. In the two pics I got of him "on the water," it looks like he's dragging a leg.🙏💗

 

Carlyle to Emerson: Work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one must, in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then.

Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine. Please let the story, dear God, in its revisions, be made too clear for any false & low interpretation because in it, I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. I don’t know now if it is consistent. Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right—or any wrong. I want it to mean that the good in man sometimes shows through his commercialism but that it is not the fault of the commercialism that it does.  Perhaps the idea would be that good can show through even something that is cheap.

It may be that we each mean different things when we speak of love and happiness, within a couple, as well as within society. Especially now. When I was growing up in middle-class suburban England, our family knew no one who was illegitimate or divorced or homosexual; all was heteronormative, and no one saw a psychiatrist unless they were truly, deeply mad. (There were a few minor exceptions: a couple of schoolmasters we thought dodgy, plus a great-uncle who had remarried after his first wife was confined to an asylum.) Now, towards the end of my life, more children are born out of wedlock in this country than within it; divorce, homosexuality and seeing a shrink are routine, while gender has become more fluid. All this is as welcome as it is belated, and we may occasionally feel sharp pity for those in previous centuries horribly trapped in the prisons of social, religious and sexual expectation. Though it would be impertinent to imagine that they understood love less well. They certa...

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.

 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...

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.

 

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).;) *