Upon a Sunday morning, then, my father was walking round the lake which he had caused to be created, regretting that he had not moved the old river bed further back, and thinking out possible fantasies in stone, torrents to fall through the hanging woods above, pavilions upon islands and decorative effects generally (a few years before, he had determined to have all the white cows in the park stenciled with a blue Chinese pattern, but the animals were so obdurate and perverse as in the end to oblige him to abandon the scheme). The lake is shaped like an hourglass or a figure-of-eight, and a bridge spans its waist. In this bridge my father met Arthur Waley advancing towards him. Each took his hat off ceremoniously and said to the other, ‘How much I wish we were going in the same direction!’ and passed on. Half an hour later they met again at the same place, having pursued their contrary courses as though they were planets whose goings and comings are immutably fixed by the sun, and repeated the salutation.
– Sir Osbert Sitwell,
(Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 220)
We always associate the word ‘book’ with printing, and think of it in terms of format and typographical convenience, but such mechanical criteria do not apply to notebooks, whose beginning and end are determined only by the unity of the poetic impulse which gives birth to a given series of poems. In other words, a notebook is the same as a ‘book’ in the sense in which it was understood by Charents, Pasternak and M. himself. The only difference was that M. did not have to stick to some particular length or structure – often artificial – which is required for a published book. But the word ‘notebook’ itself, as I have said, arose in our usage quite accidentally, owing to the fact that we were forced to write in school exercise books. It has the drawback of being too concrete in its meaning, as well as reminding one of Schumann’s ‘Notebooks’. The only thing in its favor is that it faithfully reflects the way in which we had been thrown back into a pre-Gutenberg era.
– Nadezdha Mandelstam
(Hope Against Hope, p. 193)
After about two hours of reading or discussion, we would go for a walk and then have tea at Lyons, or in the restaurant above the Regal cinema. Sometimes he came to my house in Searle street for supper. Once after supper, Wittgenstein, my wife and I went for a walk on Midsummer Common. We talked about the movements of the bodies of the solar system. It occurred to Wittgenstein that the three of us should represent the movements of the sun, earth, and moon, relative to one another. My wife was the sun and maintained a steady pace across the meadow; I was the earth and circled her at a trot. Wittgenstein took the most strenuous part of all, the moon, and ran around me while I circled my wife. Wittgenstein entered into this game with great enthusiasm and seriousness, shouting instructions at us as he ran. He became quite breathless and dizzy with exhaustion.
– Norman Malcolm
Ludwig Wittgenstein: a Memoir
(p. 51f.)
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ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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