More specifically concerning: life
17.03.02 – Sunday
17 March 2002, around 21.28.
On being made, per Alfred Russel Wallace.
Neither a borrower…
18 November 2002, around 16.31.
I have to remind myself it was only a book – mass-market paperback, pristine condition though bought used. I lent it to an acquaintance; I do not say she was a friend, because she was not. She was an acquaintance. At the time I would have compared her to a whirlwind, for wherever she went […]
Impossible Epistles
24 February 2003, around 7.59.
The letters arrived two weeks apart, sent by two different people; each requires a response, and yet I cannot think how to reply to them. The first letter was a love story; a year ago she’d met a young man, parted as friends, wrote to each other, talked on the telephone, fell in love at […]
Passing strange
9 May 2003, around 8.05.
A lyrical, a scholarly, a fastidious mind might have used seclusion and solitude to perfect its powers. Tennyson asked no better than to live with books in the heart of the country. But the mind of Elizabeth Barrett was lively and secular and satirical. She was no scholar. Books were to her not an end […]
going to…
4 April 2008, around 13.11.
I’m holding the envelope in my hand, the envelope which says where I’m going to spend the next few years. It feels like I’m holding my future, that it’s fragile and if I look at it incorrectly it will spontaneously combust or dissolve into dust. I know this is not true. I know that it […]
on biography (1)
15 November 2011, around 6.12.
Alexander Theroux. The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2011. After much consideration of this point, I came to the resolution of writing truly, if I wrote at all; of withholding nothing, though some things, from their very nature, could not be spoken of so fully as others. —Elizabeth Gaskell (Life of Charlotte Brontë, […]
on biography (2)
9 February 2012, around 11.41.
Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1996. I have little more to say. If my readers find that I have not said enough, I have said too much. I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers. I cannot map out vices, and virtues, and debateable land. —Elizabeth Gaskell (Life of Charlotte […]
biophagous
9 February 2024, around 17.26.
Erysichthon, engaging in some ill-judged arboriculture, cropped from Johann Wilhelm Baur’s illustrations to Ovid (ca. 1641) …soon memory pours forth from every direction, sprouting its vines and flowers up around you till the old garden’s taken shape in all its fragrant glory. Almost unbelievable how much can rush forward to fill an absolute blankness. —Mary […]