Category Archives: literature

literature

no, i’m not leaving exactly as i came.

When Hans took his first step away from her, Sophie cried
out: ‘Wait.’ He wheeled round.

‘Thank you.’

‘I was thinking of saying the same to you. Thank you.’

Hans walked down Glass Alley. His shadow glided from one
window to the next. Sophie stood watching him and her eyes
felt cold. She was still aware of the pang in her gut she had been
feeling since she arrived at the café, yet she felt strangely content.

She hurried down two streets until she caught up with Elsa.
He strode towards the market square. Looked at from above,
from a high balcony or a slit window in the Tower of the Wind,
they might have seemed like two insignificant creatures, two
flecks on the snow. Looked at from the ground, they were two
people weighed down by life.

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literature

I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

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literature, photography

‘Suppose I don’t go to Southampton, and come into town
this afternoon?’

‘No – I don’t think this afternoon.’

‘Very well.’

‘It’s impossible this afternoon. Various -‘

We talked like that for a while, and then abruptly we
weren’t talking any longer. I don’t know which of us hung up
with a sharp click, but I know I didn’t care. I couldn’t have
talked to her across a tea-table that day if I never talked to her
again in this world.

I called Gatsby’s house a few minutes later, but the line was
busy. I tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me
the wire was being kept open for a long distance from Detroit.
Taking out my time-table, I drew a small circle around the
three-fifty train. Then I leaned back in my chair and tried to
think.

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literature

You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms. The rim
of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
and your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

That day in Moscow, it will all come true,
when, for the last time, I take my leave,
and hasten to the heights that I have longed for,
leaving my shadow still to be with you.

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but i’ve been turning over in my mind…

….the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knick-knack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time – love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions – and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives – then I plead guilty. I’m nostalgic for my early time with Margeret, for Susie’s birth and first years, for that road trip with Annie. And if we’re talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it’s possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn’t it?

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when he saw pfife on the street…

…in her good-looking coat, she was always so fresh and full of life. She cocked her head to one side when he talked to her and squinted her eyes and listened. She listened with everything she had and talked that way too. When she said things about his work, he had the feeling that she understood what he was trying to do and why it mattered. He liked all of this, but hadn’t meant to do anything about it.

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you know i need to go away

…to make anything happen.’ He closed the notebook and put his pencil on top, rolling it back and forth with his fingertips. ‘I have to be alone to get it started, but if I was really alone, that wouldn’t work either. I need to leave that place and come back here and talk to you. That makes it real and makes it stick. Do you get what I’m saying?

‘I think so.’ I walked behind him and put my head on his shoulder, rubbing my face into his neck. But the truth was I didn’t, not really. And he knew.

‘Maybe no-one can know how it is for anyone else.’ I straightened and walked over to the window where the rain came down in streams and pooled on the sill. ‘I’m trying.’

‘Me too,’ he said.

I sighed. ‘I think it’s going to rain all day.’

‘Don’t kid yourself. It’s going to rain for a month.’

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