Commonplace Book

'At the exact threshold dividing river and ocean there was a striking underwater turbulence - colliding, churning clouds of mud, and a powerful welling-up of silver sand (Galicia is a land of granite) with billions of rock splinters briefly thrown up and catching the sunlight - a kind of curtain drawn between the two realms, a glittering gloom of tide rip between river and ocean, a changing of the guard.'

from Last Pictures?, a piece in Once Again for Thucydides by Peter Handke, translated by Tess Lewis

Commonplace Book

'How could she blaspheme God by craving from Him that one earthly boon which was the sole thing, under the sky or above it either, that seemed to her worth the taking? One face and one form which (wait but a few years at the most) would be resolved into its primal dust; would have to trust to its coffin-plate for the poor satisfaction of being distinguished from the other dust around it; this one face and form, evanescent as the cloud-faces one sees in dreams, filled up so completely the gazing space of her soul's eyes, as to leave no room for the smallest glimpse, the faintest vision of the adamant walls and towers and joy-giving gates of "Jerusalem the golden." One voice, whose tones (let but a few summers roll by) would be as unalterably dumb as the sand-whelmed Sphinx; as forgotten as the sound of last year's showers; this one voice surged and rang in her ears so that not to them could come the weakest echo of

"The shout of them that triumph; the song of them that feast."

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XII)

Eating Out and other stories by Natalie Scott (1995)

This is a collection of stories by a well-respected Australian writer and I continue, as I read through her oeuvre, to see why she has that reputation. To someone of my limited reading in Australian literature she belongs to a group of writers who deal with the well-heeled in the main, slightly from the inside I think, and who have a comic tendency which is overt only occasionally. The other main member of this enclave I can name is the brilliant Jessica Anderson, and perhaps the Elizabeth Harrower of Down in the City, The Catherine Wheel and The Watch Tower, but not so much The Long Prospect. I have read that Shirley Hazzard has a similar feel, and no doubt there are others. These stories all have food somewhere in their content, some only peripherally, and there are recipes for mentioned dishes placed after each piece. Many of the stories are good; two are outstanding. Plut-Nut is the clear winner, where a slightly snobbish family are hoist on their own petard at a 'meet the prospective son-in-law' dinner. The comedy is very satisfying, subtly handled and arrow-accurate. Desert Song is also stunning - a departure too in that a homeless man is the main character - some great rhythms. Scott occasionally slips a little into over-egged description, where the mood goes a bit stiff. This was self-published and is long out of print - definitely a candidate for rediscovery and a more central placing in its national literature.

Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott (1818)

This is a famous novel and I am divided in mind about it. It has Scott's trademark largesse and broad richness. It also has his trademark diffusion. The element which most strongly comes to mind that it particularly displays is an accentuation of that in the novels by the author I have read thus far (I am slowly reading through Virtue's Dryburgh Edition from 1904), the slow-growing Waverley and Guy Mannering and the far zestier The Antiquary. This is his wandering habit, whereby a character is introduced and is clearly in Scott's mind being built up to serve a significant dramatic purpose. Then his mind wanders, or the purported drama doesn't quite fit a newer plan, and the character is dropped or backgrounded while fresher vistas are plumbed. Somehow with Scott we forgive this; there is some relish of life, sparkiness of mind in him which means that this permanent deviation matters a lot less than it would with a less joyful author. The cases here are the stories of Rashleigh Osbaldistone and Diana Vernon particularly. Rashleigh's intricate two-faced manoeuvrings and Diana's no-less-than-heroine stature are belied in the time they are given in the ultimate half of the novel. But after all is said and done it's Scott, and still a joy...

Commonplace Book

'...The doctor's prescriptions had always the formidable aspect of an indictment. On a big white sheet of paper such as schoolboys use, his directions exhibited themselves in numerous paragraphs of two or three lines each, in an irregular handwriting, bristling with letters resembling spikes. And the potions, the pills, the powders, which were to be taken fasting in the morning, at midday, and in the evening, followed in ferocious-looking characters.

One of these prescriptions might read:
"Inasmuch as M.X. is affected with a chronic malady, incurable and mortal, he will take, first, sulphate of quinine, which will render him deaf, and will make him lose his memory; secondly, bromide of potassium, which will destroy his stomach, weaken all his faculties, cover him with pimples, and make his breath foul; thirdly, salicylate of soda, whose curative effects have not yet been proved, but which seems to lead to a terrible and speedy death the patient treated by this remedy. And concurrently, chloral, which causes insanity, and belladonna, which attacks the eyes; all vegetable solutions and all mineral compositions which corrupt the blood, corrode the organs, consume the bones, and destroy by medicine those whom disease has spared."'

from Mont Oriol by Guy de Maupassant (Chapter I)

Commonplace Book

'...placing myself in one of the large leathern chairs which flanked the old Gothic chimney, I watched unconsciously the bickering of the blaze which I had fostered. 'And this,' said I aloud, 'is the progress and the issue of human wishes! Nursed by the merest trifles, they are first kindled by fancy, nay, are fed upon the vapour of hope till they consume the substance which they inflame; and man, and his hopes, passions, and desires, sink into a worthless heap of embers and ashes!''

from Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott (Chapter XXXVIII)

Commonplace Book

'....there was revealed to her, within her soul, a bottomless depth, a mad, wild, reckless fervour of passion, which bid fair to blast all the life that lay before her, which had begun its blasting work already, withering up all her little innocent joys with the furnace-breath of its fiery flame, taking the sap out of her girl's pleasures, and making them like the dry twigs on a tree whose principle of life is extinct. That muddy, polluted flood of earthly love (for is not all earthly love, even that of the purest woman, polluted with the taint of mortality?) had, with its bitter waters, swallowed up and choked the spring of higher, better love, which might have refreshed and watered her soul for the garden of God. Oh, idiot! - to make so losing a bargain with this dull, passing world.'

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter IV)