Thursday, April 29, 2010

Commonplace Book

'The moon had risen and was flooding the landscape at our feet. A mist like a thin veil lay in the valley out of which the low hills rose with a weird distinctness: the distant estuary shone like a streak of silver.

"I am so glad there is a moon to-night," I said. "This view never looks so perfect as by moonlight. And it is odd that, after a time, one wants some one to show a thing to; one can't go on enjoying anything, however beautiful, alone."'

from All That Was Possible by Howard Sturgis (Letter XXX)

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Commonplace Book

'...I have had the complaint young, and got over it. I am no more likely to fall in love than I am to have the measles, or any other juvenile ailment. Of course I know that middle-aged people do sometimes have the measles, and then it is very dangerous; they die of it. But the cases are rare. And I am terribly middle-aged.'

from All That Was Possible by Howard Sturgis (Letter XXVI)

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Commonplace Book

'To-day the craft of letters has been turned into a strictly commercial transaction, and books are manufactured with the prompt neat aplomb of a pot of factory jam. Those must have been great days when it was a hall-mark of nobility to have written a book; when nobody wrote except for the love of it; when no mediocre work was turned out. Greater days still when it might mean martyrdom to have written a book; when the whole life and soul of a man went into it, freighting it with such beauty and wonder that it would defy the centuries. Have we lost the art of distillation by which the spirit was rendered to an essence and preserved in an indestructible form?'

Mary Webb (no source noted) quoted in Mary Webb: Her Life and Work by Thomas Moult (Chapter Nine)

Commonplace Book

'There are decisive moments in life when, just as the electric lights suddenly flash out in the darkness of a great city, so the eternal fires flare up in the darkness of the soul. A spark darting from another soul is enough to transmit the Promethean fire to the waiting soul. On that spring evening Olivier's calm words kindled the light that never dies in the mind hidden in the boy's deformed body, as in a battered lantern. He understood none of Olivier's arguments: he hardly heard them. But the legends and images which were only beautiful stories and parables to Olivier, took living shape and form in his mind, and were most real. The fairy-tale lived, moved, and breathed all around him. And the view framed in the window of the room, the people passing in the street, rich and poor, the swallows skimming the walls, the jaded horses dragging their loads along, the stones of the houses drinking in the cool shadow of the twilight, and the pale heavens where the light was dying - all the outside world was softly imprinted on his mind, softly as a kiss.'

from The Burning Bush by Romain Rolland, part nine of his Jean Christophe sequence, translated by Gilbert Cannan

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Commonplace Book

'The instantaneous effect which this unexpected smile of fortune produced in the appearance of our adventurer is altogether inconceivable; it plumped up his cheeks in a moment, unbended and enlightened every feature of his face; elevated his head, which had begun to sink, as it were, between his shoulders; and from a squeaking dispirited tone, swelled up his voice to a clear manly accent....'

from Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett (Chapter One Hundred and One)

Monday, April 19, 2010

Under a Different Star - Biographic 1

I am writing this blog to exorcise some demons and to see if there are any answering spirits out there.

I feel out of time I think, and out of sync with most of the world I inhabit.

Let's just start by saying I had a very bad start! I think I was born morbidly sensitive, and anyone who knows me well would no doubt recognise that trait.

But that was only part of my circumstances. I also was born into a slightly non-conformist English family in super-conformist anti-English country Australia. The Australia of the year I started school (1971) was harsh, blaming and interpersonally violent. It would have been tough for an English child on the score of nationality alone, but one that was also a bit soft and gentle, one that was pretty tenderly sensitive, had no chance. It was a maul-up.

Add to that the fact that my two much older sisters left home that year. Thus I was left alone, with parents who frankly didn't like each other very much at that time. My predominant memory of home at that age is of sour bullish fighting, with raging intense silences between.

That is not to say that there weren't up times. Plenty of memories of time spent alone, fantasising about other worlds, other times, happier things, which engrossed my mind completely; building huge fabrics of fantasy that were not traditionally 'fantastic' - no spaceships, no weird colour, no exotics in the obvious sense. Quite ordinary things which almost seemed to block out their real-time equivalents.

I had my own country. I called it Emerald Valley. We lived on a five-acre property near the natural forest catchment area for a reservoir called Millbrook in the hills above Adelaide in South Australia. I used to escape through the fence on the border of our property high on the ring of hills above it, and descend along the orange-earth fire-tracks deep into the forest, hearing nothing but the wind, the birds, the swaying of the trees and the occasional swishing bounding of a kangaroo down through one of the tight valleys. I mapped it. I placed houses in locations I liked and had my schoolmates live there. I developed reasons why this country could exist separately and no-one other than myself and whoever I invited be allowed in.

I would also go there if I was angry or miserable and let it all blow out. A family dog, a boxer called Cara, would often come with me and provide light relief as she chased kangaroos and never caught them. In a boxer's usual shambolic way, she would breathe heavingly when she'd been exerting herself and be such a force of nature in her absolute delight with a walk that a lot of melancholia was no doubt diffused....she was also a tender and seemingly aware companion when the tears had to flow.

More later.

Commonplace Book

"These were comfortable considerations to a youth of Peregrine's disposition, which was so capricious, that the more his misery increased, the more haughty and inflexible he became.....He was gradually irritated by his misfortunes into a rancorous resentment against mankind in general, and his heart so alienated from the enjoyments of life, that he did not care how soon he quitted his miserable existence....."

from Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett (Chapter One Hundred)