Take a lucky dip in this refreshing pool of posts, randomly selected like literary Russian roulette (but more fun and much safer). Or filter by category to take a deeper dive into specific themes.  Enjoy!
Architecture that shouts for joy
A beautiful description of a church, capturing a soaring, up-swooping roof, and the exhilaration it can bring to the onlooker.
‘Arches that sprang upwards like a shout of joy to...
Of wood and winter
Filling up the reservoirs with summer warmth, to keep the 'blood-sullen winter' at bay. But a 'frost-stiffened wood' can be crunchingly beautiful too.
Source: Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (London: Faber &...
Joy’s handsell
This rare word refers to 'a new year's present to wish good luck', or a foretaste, as used in George Herbert's poem 'The Holy Scriptures I':
'Thou art...
Non-negotiable
The 17th century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi names her price and sticks to it, in a letter to her patron. Incidentally slipping in some slurs on her Neapolitan counterparts.
Elsewhere...
Like a housemaid’s fancies
A delightful way to convey disorderly thoughts, and I like that 'languishing and ogling'.
'... she could scarcely keep her ideas in order. They were languishing and ogling like a...
This is my life
This statement of arrow-straight simplicity could serve as an occasional sanity check. If it rings true, we’re on track. If it causes a flinch or a wince, we probably aren’t living as we could or would...
Fuel for the body or mind?
Book burning, or bibliocide, is usually something we associate with ideologues, political or religious, fearful of the free flow of ideas. Here it is a bibliophile scholar who burns them...
Flute-like whistle
Williamson uses - and invents - a number of words to convey the sounds of otters. Whistling can be in affection or playfulness or fear, grief or warning. Other sounds...
A heart-pounding meeting
A charming first hand account of meeting the great Goethe, by the young German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, awe-struck but also reassured by the simplicity of his hero. It made me...
On writing letters
The wryness of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days is captured here in describing the cultural activity of choice for his younger brother.
Harold wraps his arm around his paper to protect...
Fate-spinning crones
Elsewhere Leigh Fermor talks of 'black-coiffed crones'. Here they are 'fate-spinning', giving a terrifying and timeless aspect to them, reinforced by their sitting beneath 'the snarl of the slogan'. 'Crone'...
Appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Appreciation may judge, but always with gratitude, and frequently with awe and wonder. Â
By ‘appreciation’ I mean something more than ‘adequate esteem’. Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one’s own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.
Source: Harold Bloom, Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 5
Love writingredux.com? Â Enjoy our sister sites:
www.foolsareeverywhere.com  I   www.nuannaarpoq.com  I  www.spyderceleste.com  Â
© Beatrice Otto 2023 - design & content unless otherwise stated - all rights reserved