In Defence of the Chaotic Method
Much to some of yours horror, I must admit that some books I have read backwards (from the end to the beginning), others I’ve started on the last page and then have flipped back to the first, and others yet I’ve started in the middle, worked my way to the end, only to start up again from the beginning and finish in the middle. This, as some might call it, is the chaotic approach. Here’s why it works.
The Machine Stops: ‘men made it, do not forget that’
In 1909, E. M. Forster writes of a society in the far-off future that ‘had long since abandoned the clumsy system of public gatherings’. People entertained themselves in self-isolated cells, able to ‘see [one another’s] image […] on the other side of the earth’, and ‘never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine’.
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”.
The Sky and Sea were the Original Drama Queens (and I love it)
If anyone ever tells you to stop being dramatic, tell them to spend some time with the sky, and sea, and wind, and embrace the bizarrely wonderful drama queens they all are - because they put on quite a show. And, without them, I’d say we’d all be hopelessly and irrevocably bored
The Hiatus of the Ordinary
The midsummer night, the eve preceding May Day. What did you do with your midsummer night last night? In any case, I’m sure it did not involve falling in love with a donkey’s head, getting waited on by fairies, and switching bodies with your best friend…
‘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.’
‘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.