In a Maltese sculptor’s garden and studio

Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you but I have to go; this is my station.’
Lisa St Aubin de Teran

secrets

One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion. Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed.

Javier Marias, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spears

walnut

The page that was blank to begin with is now crossed from top to bottom with tiny black characters – letters, words, commas, exclamation marks – and it’s because of them the page is said to be legible. But a kind of uneasiness, a feeling clsoe to nausea, an irresolution that stays in my hand – these make me wonder: do these black marks add up to reality? The white of the paper is an artifice that’s replaced the translucency of parchment and the ochre surface of clay tablets; but the ochre and the translucency and the whiteness may all possess more reality than the signs that mar them.

Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet.

The Anglo-Saxons recognised some plants and trees as incomers, like the walnut, whose name comes from wealh, ‘far away, foreign’. 

A Little History of British Gardening , Jenny Uglow

from Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ 1925

The Odyssey is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading quickly in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what happens next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown people, crafty, subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world itself a small one, since the sea which separates island from island has to be crossed by little hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the seagulls. It is true that the islands are not thickly populated, and the people, though everything is made by hand, are not closely kept at work. They have had time to develop a very dignified, a very stately society, with an ancient tradition of manners behind it, which makes every relation at once orderly, natural, and full of reserve.

Penelope crosses the room; Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful, have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows they are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.

(a useful mini-essay on it here)

from GK Chesterton’s The New Jerusalem 1920

This book is only an uncomfortably large note-book; and it has
the disadvantages, whether or no it has the advantages, of notes that were
taken on the spot.  Owing to the unexpected distraction of other duties,
the notes were published in a newspaper as they were made on the spot;
and are now reproduced in a book as they were published in the newspaper.
The only exception refers to the last chapter on Zionism; and even
there the book only reverts to the original note-book. A difference
of opinion, which divided the writer of the book from the politics
of the newspaper, prevented the complete publication of that chapter
in that place.  I recognise that any expurgated form of it would
have falsified the proportions of my attempt to do justice in a very
difficult problem; but on re-reading even my own attempt in extenso,
I am far from satisfied that the proper proportions are kept.
I wrote these first impressions in Palestine, where everybody
recognises the Jew as something quite distinct from the Englishman
or the European; and where his unpopularity even moved me in the
direction of his defence.  But I admit it was something of a shock
to return to a conventional atmosphere, in which that unpopularity
is still actually denied or described as mere persecution.
It was more of a shock to realise that this most obscurantist of all types
of obscurantism is still sometimes regarded as a sort of liberalism.
To talk of the Jews always as the oppressed and never as the
oppressors is simply absurd; it is as if men pleaded for reasonable
help for exiled French aristocrats or ruined Irish landlords,
and forgot that the French and Irish peasants had any wrongs at all.
Moreover, the Jews in the West do not seem so much concerned to ask,
as I have done however tentatively here, whether a larger and less
local colonial development might really transfer the bulk of Israel
to a more independent basis, as simply to demand that Jews shall
continue to control other nations as well as their own.  It might be
worth while for England to take risks to settle the Jewish problem;
but not to take risks merely to unsettle the Arab problem,
and leave the Jewish problem unsolved.

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Dorothy Parker on working for Vogue

From The Paris Review interviews.

INTERVIEWER

Your first job was on Vogue, wasn’t it? How did you go about getting hired, and why Vogue?

DOROTHY PARKER

After my father died there wasn’t any money. I had to work, you see, and Mr. Crowninshield, God rest his soul, paid twelve dollars for a small verse of mine and gave me a job at ten dollars a week. Well, I thought I was Edith Sitwell. I lived in a boarding house at 103rd and Broadway, paying eight dollars a week for my room and two meals, breakfast and dinner. Thorne Smith was there, and another man. We used to sit around in the evening and talk. There was no money, but, Jesus, we had fun.

INTERVIEWER

What kind of work did you do at Vogue?

PARKER

I wrote captions. “This little pink dress will win you a beau,” that sort of thing. Funny, they were plain women working at Vogue, not chic. They were decent, nice women—the nicest women I ever met—but they had no business on such a magazine. They wore funny little bonnets and in the pages of their magazine they virginized the models from tough babes into exquisite little loves. Now the editors are what they should be: all chic and worldly; most of the models are out of the mind of a Bram Stoker, and as for the caption writers—my old job—they’re recommending mink covers at seventy-five dollars apiece for the wooden ends of golf clubs “—for the friend who has everything.” Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.