Take Light and Colour, and Write Me the World
Today, two quarantine book recommendations about light and colour that will inspire you and give you a newly-found wonder at creation and what we see every day: “The Secret Lives of Colour”, and “Six Facets of Light”.
Tell Me Your Stories
Tell me your stories! Any fun and fantastical stories you have heard or experienced over the years. Could be a family anecdote, a story you overheard in a cafe, or one of your own…Start a storytelling thread with me so we can combat boredom together!
‘The swallows will still come’'
Messages from St Andrean shop windows; ‘the swallow has come, bringing lovely seasons and lovely years’.
‘The growing terror of nothing to think about’
‘you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about’ (III.20-21). The answer to this dread of monotony is perhaps then to ‘be still’, to allow monotony for some time, for ‘there is yet faith, / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.’
On Epilogues (for St Andrews)
I have always said that St Andrews was at the edge of the world. Here, time lags, and seems to draw out the sun each morning and night to more colours and directions than you thought possible, as though stretching for time…
‘Don’t Eat Too Much Chocolate or Imbibe Too Much Gin!’
Today’s light-hearted thought is only this: in literature, you often find just the pearls of wisdom you were looking for. In today’s post, we have five literary quotes for times of quarantine.
Why Do Birds Sing?
Today, amidst the silence, I heard a single bird practising a melody. I wonder if it knew that the world was now listening - that the streets had fallen silent and the people had retreated to listen from the inwards out.
Quarantina - 40 days
It’s interesting to me that during this time of Lent, we’ve all been constricted to quarantine, a word whose origins come from quarantina, Italian for “forty days”.