More Pleasures of Reading

[Pianorak]

. . . I've just received a copy of South, erm, Wind with a rather, erm, cheeky (cheeky? yes, I think that would be right) picture on the cover. Bit long ...

Ah, hmm, that would be the Ms Wilberforce. Must admit I pictured her looking somewhat older. But hey, if it sells a few more copies . . . A bit long? Bet you won't say that once you've reached the last page.

[vinteuil]

Comfort

People often said that there was nothing sadder, She mourned, than the remembrance of past happiness; but to her it seemed that not the way we remembered, but the way we forget, was the real tragedy of life. Everything fades from us; our joys and sorrows vanish alike in the irrevocable flux; we can't stay their fleeting. Didn't I feel, She moaned, the sadness of this forgetting, this out-living all the things we care for, this constant dying, so to speak, in the midst of life?

I felt its sadness very much; I felt quite lugubrious about it. 'And yet,' I said (for I did really want to think of something that might console this lamentable lady), 'and yet can't we find, in this fading of recollection, some recompense, after all? Think, for instance—.' But what, alas, could I suggest?

'Think,' I began once more after a pause of deep consideration, 'think of forgetting, and reading, and reforgetting and re-reading all Jane Austen's novels!'

[vinteuil]

" . . . We came to you about a practical matter, and an urgent one. We want to remove a crying scandal from the island. The habits of Miss W., as I think I pointed out, are shocking to all decent folks. I suppose you won't deny that?"

"I remember your using those words. They struck me as remarkable because, for my own part, I have not yet discovered any man, woman, or child who could shock me. Some persons make a profession of being scandalized. I am profoundly distrustful of them. It is the prerogative of vulgarians to be shocked. If I ever felt inclined to blush, it would not be at the crooked behaviour of men, but at their crooked intellectual processes. Whenever a so-called scandal comes my way, I thank God for the opportunity of seeing something new and learning something to my advantage."

Pianorak - if you like Norman Douglas and South Wind you might also like to try T H White They Winter Abroad and Aubrey Menen The Duke of Gallodoro ... similar subjects, similar tone of voice, but interestingly different...

[vinteuil]

Oxford Street

One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad--into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum - I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.

Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.

[vinteuil]

The Pyramid

'To read Gibbon,' I said, as we paced that terrace in the sunshine, 'to peruse his metallic, melancholy pages, and then forget them; to re-read and re-forget the Decline and Fall; to fill the mind with that great, sad, meaningless panorama of History, and then to watch those Kings and Conquerors, those Heresiarchs and monks and Patriarchs and Councils all fade from our memory as they have faded from the glass of time—'
As she turned to me with a glance full of enthusiasm, 'What is so enchanting,' I asked myself, 'as the dawn of an acquaintance with a clever woman with whom one can share one's thoughts?'
It was her remark about History, how she believed the builders of the Great Pyramid had foreseen and foretold many events of Modern History, which made a soul-estranging shadow, an Egyptian darkness, loom between us on that terrace.

[Pianorak]

Thanks, vinteuil for the two recommendations which will be ordered forthwith. As I am such a slow reader, and S. Bakewell and Montaigne are the current project, heaven knows when their turn will come.

Oxford Street

A wild and improbable guess: Madame Blavatsky or one of her followers?

[french frank]

COMFORT is lovely. I used to seek out small, self-standing paragraphs from interesting works with just that kind of gentle humour to set as translation passages for students. And I hoped they would ask me where they came from and seek out the original works ...

I've never read Logan Pearsall Smith in 'quantity' but he's one of those authors who catch your eye when browsing Bartlett or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

"To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober."

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers."

"There is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

and, of course:

"Some people say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."

[Stanley Stewart]

There is also the pleasure of reading prompted by a R3 broadcast. Yesterday, (3 Feb), I listened to the Afternoon on 3 performance of Debussy's "Pelleas & Melisande", recorded last month at the Met, NY, conducted by Simon Rattle, production, Jonathan Miller. Maeterlinck's play illuminated by Debussy in simple landscapes and poetical imagery in which tenderness and gravity are disconcertingly intermingled. A bonus, too, in direct presentation, free from sound bites and inane chatter which is the norm in the Saturday Met presentations. As an aid, I used the libretto from the EMI References CD set, conducted by Roger Desormiere, delicately remastered by Keith Hardwick in 1988. The set also includes Debussy Melodies from Maggie Teyte/Alfred Cortot; Mary Garden/Claude Debussy.

However, in the past 24 hours, I've been steeped in "Debussy Remembered", an anthology of reminiscences by Roger Nichols (Faber & Faber, 1992). Engaging contributions about the stormy dress rehearsals for "P & M", in 1902, with wider comments from Colette, Sir Henry Wood, pianists Marguerite Long and Ricardo Vines, singers Maggie Teyte and Ninon Vallin, to keep me reading and rummaging through historic recordings. Interactivity at its best.

[vinteuil]

... I used to seek out small, self-standing paragraphs from interesting works with just that kind of gentle humour to set as translation passages for students. And I hoped they would ask me where they came from and seek out the original works ...
I've never read Logan Pearsall Smith in 'quantity' but he's one of those authors who catch your eye when browsing Bartlett or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
."

Yes - all three of my quotes are from Logan Pearsall Smith's Trivia and More Trivia, my current bedside book. It was tempting just to go on quoting page after page of these writings - for me they provide just what French Frank meant in her Opening Post, defining the point of this thread as -

to share savoured bits of writing which gave particular pleasure for some reason.

[french frank]

They certainly gave me particular pleasure . Reading your excerpts I did feel I recognised the voice but don't think I would have hit on the identity unaided. I was thinking 1890s which would have been almost right for the first volume. But there is an 'Englishness' that would have put me off the track - I had LPS down as an out-and-out American - but there, books of quotations don't offer much in the way of biography.

[vinteuil]

It was tempting just to go on quoting page after page of these writings...

I can't resist... just two more, and then I'll stop...

The Ear-Trumpet

They were talking of people I did not know. 'How do they spend their time there?' someone asked.
Then I, who had been sitting too long silent, lifted up my voice. 'Ah, that's a mysterious question, when you think of it, how people spend their time. We only see them after all in glimpses; but what, I often wonder, do they do in their hushed and shrouded hours—in all the mysterious interstices of their lives?'
'In the what?'
'In the times, I mean, when no one sees them. In the intervals.'
'But that isn't the word you used?'
'It's the same thing—the interstices—'
Of course there was a deaf lady present. 'What did you say?' she inquired, holding out her ear-trumpet for my answer.


Guilt

What should I think of? I asked myself as I opened my umbrella. How should I occupy my imagination, that harsh, dusky, sloshy, winter afternoon, as I walked to Bedford Square? Should I think of Arabia; of Albatrosses, or of those great Condors who sleep on their outspread wings in the high white air above the Andes?

But a sense of guilt oppressed me. What had I done, or left undone? And the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski; - and I’d never read one word of all their works!

[amateur51]

Vinteuil, you have opened up my mind to this wonderful writer, for which many thanks

I'm away to Amazon to see if there's a modestly priced edition

[french frank]

Yes, isn't he wonderful? (I mean LPS.) Strange that I really have a strong aversion to comedy and seldom laugh out loud at anything. And yet, on the other hand, find it hard to relate to someone who shows no sign of having a sense of humour. And more, sharing my sense of humour and making me smile, spontaneously, malgré moi.

Have just started South Wind. Love the style.

Am51 - I spotted something called All Trivia yesterday, about £2.

[Pianorak]

Have just started South Wind. Love the style.

Finished SW tonight. Back to Montaigne. However, the vinteuil recommendations are in the post . . .

[amateur51]

Many thanks french frank - it's on its way