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September has come, it is hers Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. So I give her this month and the next Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already So many of its days intolerable or perplexed But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls Dancing over and over with her shadow Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls And all of London littered with remembered kisses. ↗
When does the year begin? Well: that rather depends: on who you are, and where. The Church kalendar – like the academic, which is hewn of the ecclesiastical – begins after the harvest-tide, with Advent, a time of preparation, light kindling and shining forth even as darkness gathers. The countryman’s calendar is governed by the rhythms of the earth, of sowing and of harvest. The angler’s year, the shooting man’s, the hunter’s, all these are in the disposition of God – or Nature, if you fancy yourself allergic to God – even as is the countryman’s. ↗
The nation’s forests were being cut faster than they could grow back. In the 1890s, while Aldo was growing up, the United States had begun to set aside forest reserves to protect the trees. Then, while Aldo was in high school, one of the country’s first forestry schools opened at Yale University. Aldo knew immediately what he wanted to do. If he could become a forester, he could get paid to work in the woods all day. How could a job get any better? ↗
#wilderness #yale #nature
Let the wet earth embrace you firmly, soundly. She needs to be revived, she needs to beat like a heart full of adrenaline inside a chest. ↗
And how to stop the rot? How to salvage something from time's passage? How long before the map makers decide to erase this structure completely? Before it becomes a nameless ruin? And then a mere pile of stones? Mossed over. Forgotten. How long before they lift its name from their charts and from our collective memory? The only thing I can do is fill the place with music. ↗
The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day—terrified of letting him slip and tumble—I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. 'I am so sorry,' said this courteous old genius. 'But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?' I naturally protested with all the energy of an English middle-class upbringing: couldn't hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. 'You will remember,' he said, 'the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.' And he then recited the following: What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood How that face shall watch his when cold it lies? Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes, Of what her kiss was when his father wooed? The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—'Inclusiveness'—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my thanks when he said, again with utter composure: 'While you are in Chile do you plan a call on General Pinochet?' I replied with what I hoped was equivalent aplomb that I had no such intention. 'A pity,' came the response. 'He is a true gentleman. He was recently kind enough to award me a literary prize.' It wasn't the ideal note on which to bid Borges farewell, but it was an excellent illustration of something else I was becoming used to noticing—that in contrast or corollary to what Colin MacCabe had said to me in Lisbon, sometimes it was also the right people who took the wrong line. ↗
We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous. ↗
Tell this to ladies: how a hero man Assail a thick and scandalous giant Who casts true shadow in the sun, And die, but play no truant. This is more horrible: that the darling egg Of the chosen people hatch a creature Of noblest mind and powerful leg Who cannot fathom nor perform his nature. ↗
