Singing a stone-song
Water is the principal element in Williamson's assiduously researched, powerfully imagined life of an otter. I loved the idea of its singing a song by flowing over stones on its way to the sea. 'The water sang its stone-song in the dark as it flowed its...
The law of life
We need water for life, and life and water share a fundamental law: change. They may also share another, apparently contradictory quality, that of being always different and yet somehow the same. 'The law of life was also the law of water - everlasting...
Ferrari on aerodynamics
This is of course an outrageous statement, but I loved it when I saw it spray-painted on the wall of a motor museum in the Netherlands. Ridiculously macho approach, breezily dismissive of working with the power of physics to add speed. No, you work with...
The path to alchemy
The route to alchemy?  There is none, there is no set path. As I understand this enigmatic injunction, we need to find our own path to creating, not seek or follow others' paths. Which isn't to preclude great draughts of inspiration from the alchemy they...
The eyes have it
An imaginative description of an otter's reaction to the firstborn of her first litter. Williamson spent years studying otters before and while attempting to recreate their lives and feelings in writing. A masterpiece of human empathy for another...
Treading water
Tarka's mother cleverly entices her cubs into the water, first by putting the food she has caught close to the water, then teaching them to hunt for themselves by various feints and incentives. Water is their element but there is a momentary fear when they...
I find it moving that no literary text is utterly original, no literary text is completely unique, that it stems from previous texts, built on quotations and misquotations, on the vocabularies fashioned by others and transformed through imagination and use. Writers must find consolation in the fact that there is no very first story and no last one. Our literature reaches further back than the beginnings of our memory permits us, and further into the future than our imagination allows us to conceive, but that must be the only barrier. Â
Source: Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2007), p. 139
Long term thinking
A family gathering for the christening of the heir to the Gormenghast title, Titus, appears to be the first time this disfunctional family gets together since the christening of his now 15 year old sister.Here, Lady Groan, Countess of Gormenghast, seeing...
A thinking breakfast
This is one of two delightful quotations from Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan in which the characters mention their need to think. Here we have 15 year old Fuchsia, daughter of the Earl of Gormenghast, eccentric but saner than many of the adults around her,...
Zeus dispenses with practicalities
Zeus here neatly rebuffs his daughter Athene's requests. I like his suitably arch reaction, which puts all supplicants in their petty place, even gorgeous goddesses, allowing the god of gods to just hang out on Olympus undisturbed. ‘Child, I am God, Please...
Of leaderless leadership
'Leadership' litters newspapers and networks such as LinkedIn, with people claiming to embody it, or vaunting the leadership of others. It's perhaps one of the most over-hyped terms of our time, and rarely less convincingly than when combined with the term...
Otters at play
Henry Williamson's spare writing is single-point focussed on getting inside the mind and life of an otter, as nearly as a human can. Â He observed them in their natural context for years and his revisions to the draft were aimed solely at removing anything...
A mouth filled with eat-water
Henry Williamson's slim study of otters is a masterpiece of limpid writing and of human empathy for other species. Through minute observation and honest intent, he has cleaved as closely as he can to conveying an authentic sense of what it might be like to...
A fondness for roofs
Clarice and Cora are two halves of an insane echo-chamber - a pair of identical twins who need to get out more. They live in the south wing of a vast pile of masonry, drawing life force from the rankling resentment of apparently lost power.They are so...
From happiness to revolt
An intriguing view of happiness which would surely resonate with totalitarian regimes and dictatorial mindsets.In this case and on this occasion, Flay can tolerate the momentary happiness around him as it is triggered by an event - the birth of a male heir...
Dying for a song
A surprising, refreshing view of God as one who forgives singers as sinners because he just loves their song. "Shrewd devil, you know very well that God pardons singers no matter what they do, because he can simply die for a song... " Source: Nikos...
A sweetened world
This is a beautiful description of a moment of understanding or enlightenment. Wherever you are, and whatever you are grappling with, may you have moments when the world about you sweetens, grows circular and fills your grasp.  And death vanishes into the...
When does a world disappear?
When does a world disappear? When inequality goes too far. Inequality seems much in the news these days, an apparently growing bane regardless of how well people are doing at either end of whatever spectrum. This stark and extreme example sums up the...
The cry of justice
Sooner or later, someone, somewhere will cry out against a wrong, no matter how small and despised their voice to begin with, nor how long they have tolerated it previously. This pithy assertion caught my attention just as three former Presidents - who...
Of strength and tenderness
This comes from Kazantzakis's account of Jesus' life and death, and I was astonished by the prayer he puts in Christ's mind as he braces for the coming crucifixion. What an original and touching test of endurance: the capacity to undergo indescribable suffering and...
From mud to spirit
Yes, there is much you can do to transmute mud into brightness if you have enough time. I love the variety of interpretations I find regarding time and our relationship to it, and here it is cast at its most helpful, as the element that can 'ripen all'. Of...
A rotting bog of security
In Kazantzakis' lively version of Christ's life, Jesus' mother wishes only that his spiritual struggles don't get in the way of his marrying a nice girl and giving her grandchildren she can parade in the Biblical equivalent of the park. She never quite...
Of love and torment
Kazantzakis' bold and imaginative retelling of Christ's life - and death - gives a new take on some of the Biblical characters you may have thought you knew through Sunday schools or other religious (Christian) instruction. In his version, Mary is...
Man in a hurry
Jesus lays out a few ground rules to Judas whom, it seems, could have done with a dose of quinuituq. I loved this lesson in patience, and the idea that men and trees are bound by the same laws of God. "If you love me, be patient. Look at the trees. Are...
Steady as she goes
Sometimes the world - at least our human version of it - feels wobbly, so I found this affirmation of its steadiness and solid foundations in some sense reassuring. But of course, it depends which - or whose - world we are talking about, and then there is...
When God mixes with man
An uplifting depiction of a potentially winning combination? I also liked the intimacy and proximity implied here, not a distant thunderer in the heavens or up some inaccessible mountain lobbing brickbats and lightening bolts, but to his left and to his...
Where hope begins
At first glance this posits the last place you would think to look for the beginnings of hope: where there is none. Yet, once in a while, when despair is caused by temporary sorrows, there can be a point when you know, raw and wrung out as you are, that...
Oddly hinged
A beautiful way to remind us that all may not be as it seems. Oddly hinged is more interested than 'unhinged' as it allows some latency for the unexpected, some room for the numinous to astound us, or for us to astound ourselves, some space to be more...
A visitation from a minor god
The past is a place which enriches me in almost all I do, and I love travelling there as much as I love travelling abroad. As Henry Miller said, it 'fructifies the present', and I see history as a vertical version of geography - a place you can visit and...
When is a virtue not a virtue?
This struck me - virtues that are but by-products of fear and poverty, may not be virtues at all. If you have no money (or credit), lauding your frugality is hardly meaningful. May your virtues come from you naturally rather than being forced upon you by...
Of time and water
A heartening description of time as the great irrigator of the world. See another such ripening interpretation by Kazantzakis. 'Time ran on like immortal water, and irrigated the world.' Source: Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation, trans. P.A....
Time in two dimensions
A striking metaphor for time hovering or collapsing, in two versions of a bird, alive and flying, or keeling and dying. 'Time still hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses altogether like a bird keeled over with a heart attack,...
The slope of time
The more I connect with the past, the more I connect with the present, and I liked this use of quietness as a way to 'feel the slope of time'. And yes, how far we have come from Mesopotamia, but similarly, how far back we go, both to and beyond...
Time as landscape
How many of us live day to day doling out time fretfully! I liked this alternative, easy, generous, striding engagement with time, allowing you to traverse other vastnesses confidently. 'If the mind releases its fiduciary grip on time, does not dole it...
Lasting and reciprocal
Ah, therein lies the rub. This strikes me as a pithy and poetic definition of environmental sustainability: to be lasting, it must be reciprocal. We aren't quite there yet, we haven't quite figured out what 'reciprocal' means in our engagement with...
Cooling the ardour of the Archduke
A wonderful, quirky episode in Orlando: a bizarre game played for hours, days, weeks, by Orlando and the Archduke whose amorous attentions she is trying to rebuff. They play the Fly Loo Game, which seems to involve trying slip dead flies unnoticed where...
On growing up
An interesting definition of growing up - losing your illusions. But then humanly allowing the possibility that you will acquire new ones. 'I am growing up,' she thought, taking her taper. 'I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones'......
Toads versus rapiers
Having roundly failed to deter the advances of an Archduke by brazenly cheating him out of tens of thousands of pounds, Orlando resorts to even baser means. Her self-justification is a wonder, as if a rapier were a more noble way of dealing with an...
Trick or miracle?
I love the idea of trusting in Nature, but have to wonder whether it is capable of such apparently conscious agency in our lives, whether playing tricks or working miracles. If such agency is real, may it ever work miracles for you. 'And then Nature, in...
Dead or alive?
This marvelously stark encounter with a dark stranger proves to be Orlando's first meeting with the man she will marry. Her energetic statement is a reflection of having been pursued for a century or so with a sackload of court cases, many of which...
Up and out at dawn
Orlando, who at this stage in her 400 year life has only quite recently woken up to find herself transformed into a woman, has finally come back to her vast old family home. Her staff, who accept her new gender without batting an eyelid, still detect...
Of life, lovers, spaniels and sympathy
Orlando's four hundred year span seems to boil down to the search for Life, Love and Authorship. Here she is learning that lovers aplenty may not be enough to provide either Life or Love (let alone Authorship). This is not the first time that it is to a...
Of long and short time
While I have seen many comments on the elasticity of experienced time, this is the first one connecting its length or shortness with whether the time is spent doing or thinking. I can't immediately see the correlation, as it would surely depend on what it...
Sickle and circular
What a beautifully fresh alliteration for the usual 'wax and wane' of the moon. 'He saw the moon sickle and then circular.' Source: Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. with an introduction by Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: World's Classics, 1992), p....
Time of the mind
Time and our perceptions of it fascinate me. Here Orlando comments on its strange elasticity inside the mind. Indeed in need of further investigation. 'The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges...
A comprehensive indictment
Orlando's elaborate life includes a depressing barrage of lawsuits as conflicting as they are outrageous. While the law trundles through its processes, she is allowed to retire to her estates and live incognito and in limbo between being male or female on...
Of signs, sympathies and presentiments
Still unravelling the mystery on this one, and enjoy the playfulness and acuity with which we appear to 'pick up' signals when in fact we may be intuitively choosing to see something as a form of subtle self-guidance. Another mystery is the degree to which Jane Eyre's...
Who loves you best, whom you love best …
The sweet playfulness of Jane's relationship with Rochester, and, finally, the happy ending. 'That depends on circumstances, sir - on your choice.' 'Which you shall make for me, Jane. I will abide by your decision.' 'Choose then, sir - her who...
Busy busy busy
One of the inconsequential but socially better placed characters Jane has to endure, at least until she finds her heart's home. 'Eliza still spoke little: she had evidently no time to talk. I never saw a busier person than she seemed to be; yet it...
A wanderer
Jane's days in the wilderness are terrifying, taking her close to 'death's door'.  The first refuge she finds from wandering later proves to include another trap, and so she sets off again. But she finds it. Finds her place on this earth. And so stops...
A plain without bounds
Again, a reference to a cramped and constraining existence and her desperate need to escape its shackles.  I had remembered the passionate relationship with Mr. Rochester but had forgotten the other attempt to bind her, when her Puritanical cousin...
Of frantic birds and free human beings
A withering riposte to any attempt at ensnarement or wing-clipping. Mr. Rochester tries to bind Jane to him but soon learns that nothing will drive her away faster.'Jane, be still; don't struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its...
Enlarging your destiny
The touching, palpable sense of expansion and hope that comes of being treated with respect and affection. This is a powerful and recurring theme: the need for freedom and being loved strongly and simply and for yourself. 'My thin crescent-destiny...
Gasping for freedom
The departure of the one kind person in the orphanage where she has spent more than half her young life, triggers - in a single afternoon - Jane's realisation that she can no longer stay there.She immediately sets about planning her escape, seeking and securing a job...
Of the unspoken
A short and thoughtful statement. He doesn't elaborate and it is hard to know what drew him to this conclusion. Given how much religion is spoken, it's an interesting comment. 'What is religion? That which is never spoken.' 18 August 1858 ...
Wrong by a jugful
A charming way to say that someone is seriously wrong - not right by a jugful. I will try to slip this into my daily speech and see if anyone notices. '... he says that his account is not right by a jugful, that he does not come within half a mile of the...
Studying the ways of men
So that's the secret of the fox's cunning - they hide out of sight and study us! Thoreau has dozens of these tiny observations about animals.See also Mervyn Peake's foxy simile.'Farmer said yesterday that he thought foxes did not live so much in the depth...
The past as a concertina of time
I collect comments on and perceptions of time. This one is striking and I am as guilty of it as anybody. While we allow significant differences between recent centuries (the 18th century being Very Different from the 20th) we readily assume that the...
Which would you choose?
I would be hard put to choose but I think I would opt to leave behind a wall where peaches ripen. And certainly better to go unknown than to burn like a meteor. 'Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where...
Trust in dogs and roses
When humans fail you, dogs and roses remain, which has the advantage of simplifying the business of living and stripping it down to a couple of reliable essentials. See the full quotation below. 'Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any...
Of newt’s slobber and peacock’s gall
A high opinion of doctors, clearly. I loved this scattergun approach to diagnosis and treatment: throw the whole therapeutic cabinet at your patient and see if something sticks - see the full quotation below. All this is due to their bafflement at...
People to go with the furniture
Orlando goes on a massive interior design spree, lavishing huge expense on new furniture and other luxuries for the 365 room sprawl that is his-her ancestral pile. Then she notices something is missing: people to sit or lie in them. 'Chairs and tables,...
Affluence of life and certainty of flow
How about that for a well-wishing phrase to fling into the world! May you enjoy both affluence of life and certainty of flow, as the strong, fine, kind Diana does.  One of the most attractive characters in this book. Shame about the brother, though he...
Heart and soul
As we begin to grapple with the implications of artificial intelligence and robots, this allusion more than 150 years ago to an automaton and machine without feelings is striking. And, yet again, Jane cannot prevent herself confronting her interlocutor...
Of original, vigorous and expanded minds
A wonderful description of how Jane's potential to blossom intellectually and emotionally is triggered by her relationship with Mr. Rochester. Both of them defy the conventions of their time and she, having far fewer resources to draw on both financially...
Of freedom and flight
Again, Mr. Rochester has to face the fact that the more he tries to bind Jane to him, the more he drives her away, though he has no idea to what degree. Â See also 'Of frantic birds and free humans'. 'Of yourself you could come with soft flight and...
Upright and unflinching
A touching and imaginative fictional description of the complexity of Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603). Orlando is a young boy of about 16 when he meets her, by then an elderly queen. I like the word 'caparisoned' to convey her always glorious power-dressing,...
No plebeians here
How noble can you get? Most aristos trace back to some humble origin until they got a knighthood or some such for pleasing their king and master. But Orlando's, no, they came out of the mists their coronets already in place. 'His fathers had been noble...
The vegetables of another age
Something wonderfully down to earth about this quick survey of differences between us and the Elizabethans, particularly in that last flourish of differentiated veg. 'The age was Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate;...
The elegant disposal of offensive documents
Remember this next time you receive an email or other document which offends you. Simply summon the footman and have him file it appropriately. And be sure to protect yourself from further contamination by the deft use of a pair of tongs. I looked long...
Hell and how to avoid it
Brontë's Jane Eyre plumbs depths of emotion both in the child and woman, but there is also a certain wry humour. Here the tiny Jane, whose small body can barely contain her strong and uncrushable spirit, responds with astounding and refreshing logic,...
Shock and reverberation
Charlotte Brontë captures the lasting impression of fear and injustice, and the emotional outrage caused by both, in a child treated with cruelty. Here the young Jane Eyre, poor cousin and ward of a hard-hearted distant aunt, is locked up in a dark and...
Of love and kindness
Jane Eyre boils down to two powerful essential needs: to give and receive love amply, and to have the liberty to determine how you live and think, and to do both in a generous, whole-hearted way.After being alternately neglected and tormented by her...
Pleasant things
Jane the young woman is now entering a milieu where her deprived childhood is in stark contrast with her employer's wealth. She has just emerged from a Victorian penitentiary masquerading as a charity orphanage, where even adequate quantities of...
That grand old poem called Winter
To celebrate the winter solstice, a few crisp quotations. I loved Thoreau's description of winter as an epic in blank verse, and his words are themselves a grand old poem. Enjoy. 'That grand old poem called Winter ... What a poem! an epic in blank verse, enriched...
Sign of the clime
A ready way to reckon with the weather, according to an old boy Thoreau knew. Can't really go wrong with this formula. Old John Nutting used to say, "when it is cold it is a sign it's going to be warm," and "When it's warm it's a sign it's going to be cold."  22 Jan...
The great freeze of London
Virginia Woolf's Orlando gets under the skin of different moments in a 400 year stretch of English history. Here she zooms in on the Great Frost of 1608, prising out of the ice images from an historical account given by Thomas Dekker of a rare winter when the Thames...
A poet’s sister or a sister poet?
In Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, you sense the extent to which she supported her brother's writing. Some things she records become material for his poems. She also reads aloud to him, including his own compositions, and copies out his poems.But beyond this, she has a...
Need some negus?
A hot drink of port, sugar, lemon, and spice, named after a Colonel Francis Negus (d. 1732), who invented it. In Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, it seems to have been used medicinally, along with broth. A delicious sounding toddy for a miserable winter cold.'We also...
How to win a train ticket to Tashkent
This vast novel, full of war and suffering, also has moments of levity. Here we have someone refusing to curtail his right to say whatever he thinks about literature, life and politics, talking and arguing his way into being given a free train ticket.'In 1926...
In praise of senseless, eternal kindness
Another plea by Grossman for uncomplicated, unplanned and even unwitnessed kindnesses, as opposed to those commandeered by ideologies.Whatever your beliefs, may you give and receive such random acts of kindness in equal measure.'The private kindness of one individual...
Of eyes that saw too much
This is part of a detailed, detached account of what happened when people entered a gas chamber, as experienced by Sofya, a Russian doctor in Grossman's 800 page novel of the Second World War in and around Russia. I found it moving that he focuses on her eyes, which...
Captain Grekov’s eyes
This is a memorable description of Captain Grekov, commander of House 6/1 in the rubble of Stalingrad, summing up so much of the man by the look in his eyes. See also in the same book a touching account of the eyes of a woman - with much of what they had seen in the...
The kernel of human kindness
Having been caught between the colliding tectonic plates of two totalitarian systems, it is easy to see how Grossman saw history not in terms of a matched battle between good and evil, but of a juggernaut trying to mow down seedlings of kindness. Despite - or because...
Kindness maketh man
What makes us human? Simple kindness is a key element according to Grossman. It depends partly on how you define 'human' of course, whether to describe a particular species, or in the sense that is redolent with tenderness, vulnerability, feeling, sensitivity. 'This...
An anatomy of anguish
This graphic and heart-rending typology of despair makes me conscious of having been mercifully spared much of anything that could be likened to despair. Count your blessings, indeed. 'Abarchuk sighed. ‘You know what, someone ought to write a treatise on despair in...
Love among the rubble
This refers to a love affair that burgeons in the grimness of Stalingrad, and I like how Grossman expands the spectrum to show that love can happen in the worst places, full of 'noise, stench and rubble'. The photo by Angela Compagnone seemed the perfect backdrop for...
A thousand years of history
On the centenary of the October Revolution, I wonder how Russians today would feel about this terse statement by Grossman. 'Russia has seen many things during the one thousand years of its history. There is only one thing that Russia has not seen in one thousand years...
Communing with the cosmos
Glorious moment in this splendid, human novel: an army officer camped somewhere on the steppe enjoys a moment of embracing the magnificence of the night sky even while attending to more basic needs. I liked the naturalness and philosophic communing with the cosmos in...
Good versus kind
The 800 pages of Grossman's splendid Life and Fate is occasionally interlarded with heartfelt asides by the author, including pleas for simple, spontaneous kindness as opposed to state-sponsored, ideologically gift-wrapped 'good' with a capital 'G'. Â Sometimes he...
Like atoms of radium
A fine metaphor for dots of kindness shining through darkness; Grossman's hope for the future is largely vested in the fact that the great machinery of totalitarian brutality has failed to extinguish these random sparks of human warmth. 'Even at the most terrible...
Eighteenth century entitlement
The vivid and voluble Mrs Poyser chipping in with her endless fount of wisdom and human commentary.  I like this as an early expression of someone having a sense of entitlement, which is how I read it. Mrs Poyser is a character I like very much, but I wouldn't want...
Love in hyperbolical peas
How to show your love for the prettiest girl in the dairy?  As a gardener, you obviously present your avowals through delicious strawberries and outstanding peas. Sadly for her later suffering, Hetty was unmoved, preferring more glamorous and glittering attentions....
Unpitying consequences
This moving and powerful novel is all about the dire consequences of flighty and initially apparently inconsequential decisions, snow-balling into terrible choices. I often wonder about the random effects of 'small' decisions. You might decide to delay going out by...
Well-chiselled politeness
I'm all for politeness and things being well-chiselled, but this is a chilling form - impeccable yet indifferent as to whether it delivers sugar or venom. 'He always spoke in the same deliberate, well-chiselled, polite way, whether his words were sugary or venomous.'...
Hunger in the raw
This is one of the most graphic, disturbing descriptions of the effects of severe hunger I have seen, written by a man who witnessed it in extreme situations of war and death camps. It makes a mockery of the common throw away line of 'I'm starving ...' when in fact...
Let’s begin with man
This 800 page riveting novel is in some senses one giant plea for simple, spontaneous, sincere kindness towards and between individuals. Not as an ideology, but as a day to day modus operandi. If you read Grossman, you will be more on your guard against ideologies,...
The three ‘S’s of happinesss
A dulcet and sibilant summary of the source of felicity. Wishing you thrice times blessings of slumber, sunshine and sweets.  I wonder if the three things also begin with 'S' in the original Russian. One of the strengths of Grossman's massive, powerful masterpiece is...
Space for thought
I like the notion that a confined physical space need not impede vast thought. It reminds me of an injunction I read decades ago, in which the headmaster of Joseph Needham, the great scholar of Chinese science and civilization, told the then schoolboy to 'Think...
Tenderness vs severity
This encouragement to err on the side of tenderness is typical of George Eliot, who quietly, gently pleads for greater kindness and humanity in our dealings with one another. Â See other pleas for pity, compassion and tolerance, by Theodore Dreiser and John...
Gladness and despair
A finely phrased evocation of the twin elements of human experience of time, every new morning or moment heralding good or bad for somebody somewhere. We can only work towards increasing and making the most of 'new forces' for gladness, genius and love. 'For there is...
Defining moments
It has always interested me how life can turn on a sixpence, for better and worst. Adam Bede is one of the finest English novels, and it has a number of moments when events take a fateful turn. Here we have Adam recalling - all his life - exactly where he was and...
Living like pigs
With all due respect to our porcine friends, I loved this line by the competent, demanding and house proud farmer's wife, Mrs Poyser, who keeps her 18th century home and dairy buildings spic and span, laying into the housemaids for their slatternly ways. However,...
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