Saturday, January 31, 2009

Sylvia Plath - Part I

Photo: Ellen Miller


For something like forty years, regardless of the fact that she was already dead by the time I'd read a single one of her poems, I've wanted to prevent Sylvia Plath from committing suicide, wanted to reach into her journals, yank her from the page, and say, "Don't! Stop! Stop it right this minute!"

For another number of years, when I lived in New Hampshire, I observed her October birthday by visiting the Rare Book Room at Smith College which boasts many books from Plath's personal library, as well as photos, diaries, letters, and various mementos connected with her.

The room is elegant, polished, varnished. Beautiful wood is everywhere -- hand-crafted glass-doored bookcases line the paneled walls; there are twelve large tables, aligned in two rows, set with sturdy upholstered chairs; the oak floors; the four large windows, framed in oak, that dominate the west wall.

To a Plath-obsessive, the room is also hallowed. Each time I entered it I mentally genuflected, dipped my fingers into an imaginary font of holy water.

There were never more than two or three other people in the room on my visits.
Once, though, I was surprised to see that the room was crowded. Every table was occupied. A screen, incommensurate with the room's character, was set up against a far wall of bookcases.

I went to the the glass-walled office in the corner where visitors are obliged to register. I glanced around for the usual curator, expecting to be recognized by her as I had been in the past.

Instead, a well-tailored man of about forty-five, exuding an air of authority, approached me. "Can I help you?" he asked in a tone that I took to mean can I help you get you ass out of here. I felt him looking down his nose at my worn leather jacket and jeans.

"Yes, I'd like to read some of Sylvia Plath's original journals that are here."

"They've all been published," the man said dismissively. "There's nothing here that hasn't been published."

This is simply not true. The inaccuracy of his statement flabbergasted me. I wish I was one of those quick-witted silver-tongued self-confident types so I could have responded: "Upon what authority -- which authority you just sadly debased -- are you making this outlandish statement?" I said, instead, "No, the ones that are published are expurgated."

My dander was up; he deserved to be punched and bloodied, but I'm not that kind of guy either. Just then I saw the familiar curator coming out of an inner office that is just beyond the windowed office. She smiled as she saw me. Everything was going to be okay now. A few steps more and she was addressing me. I turned away from the jumped-up man, making it seem as much as possible like a well-deserved dismissal. I smiled and greeted the librarian. "Hi! How are you?" she said, welcomingly.

"I'm good! It's Sylvia's birthday, so here I am again!"

"I was expecting you! You're very faithful! So what would you like to see today?"

"I'd like to read some in her journals. I guess I'd start with the 1950-53 volume."

"Let's see," she says, putting her index finger across her lip as if this will make it easier to think. "How shall we handle this? They're using this room for a class today and the lights are going to be dimmed because they're doing slides." Then she gestured with her hand for me to follow. "I know! ... come with me!"

She led me into her inner office. She cleared off an area of a jam-packed table and pulled out a chair for me. "I'll be right back," she said.

Momentarily she came out carrying a box that contains photocopied pages covered in Plath's extraordinarily neat penmanship.

"Thank you!" I said. I removed a notebook and a pencil from my knapsack and began reading.

Shortly the curator was back at my side. "Excuse me," she said. "Since it is her birthday and since you are so faithful, I think you deserve to touch the real thing." She first dangled out for me a pair of thin white muslim gloves ... one is required to put a pair on before handling certain original materials, just as, on the altar, an acolyte must pour water over the priest's fingers before the latter touches the sacred wafer. My hands covered, the curator handed me the original diary, a very ledger-like bound volume, familiar in the 1950s, perhaps nine by twelve, close to three inches thick -- one of the very volumes over which Sylvia Plath had bent her head, had held in her hands; a volume whose pages she had filled with ink from her own pen .

Examining the neatness and uniformity of Sylvia Plath's handwriting I noted that it was different from the draft-manuscripts penmanship I'd seen of some of her poems. I imagined that in her determination to be as perfect as possible she must have written the journal's entries first in draft and then copied them into the ledgers -- an amazing task, but youth thinks youth is timeless -- while, when working on one draft after another of her poems, I suppose her pen moved quickly to capture the words before her fervid imagination replaced them with more and more and more words.

After a while the curator returned. "Thank you very much," I crooned in amazement while putting the precious artifact back into her hands, for she had to return it to the vault.

I sat then for an hour or so reading from the photocopied pages, copying down some things that I knew were not in the expurgated published version. Eventually the curator returned and said, "The class out front is ended if you'd be more comfortable in the main room." I told her that I'd done enough for the day and was about to leave; I wanted to drive over to Holyoke Library and do some family research there.

Leaving the Rare Book Room and heading toward the front exit through the long corridors of the library I came upon the man who'd earlier tried to make me feel unwelcome in the Rare Book Room. He and his students -- they looked to be a dozen or so -- were flocked about one of the vitrines in which, as all along the main corridors of the Smith College Library, this or that rare manuscript is displayed. He, as well as several students, looked up as I passed. I held his eye, quickly removed my right hand from my pocket, lowered all but the middle finger, and lifted that individual finger up to lay it against my right cheek.

Outside, I walked along the curving sidewalks to exit the beautiful sunny autumn-tinged campus. I read some of the large-lettered messages that are always scrawled in chalk on the sidewalks when I'm there in Octobers. Most of them call for political action or announce meetings, but I noticed one -- and it was the one with the largest letters, letters about a foot high -- that said I LOVE MY PENIS!

I went to a coffee shop in downtown Northampton which, out front, has tables on the sidewalk. It felt charmingly Parisian to sit in the warm sun at an outdoor table with an expensive latte. While watching passers-by, I pondered just what sort of person would write I LOVE MY PENIS on the sidewalk at one of the country's most radically-feminist colleges.

I couldn't imagine.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Eugene O'Neill; Forest Hills Cemetery; Boston

I've never seen any of his plays. I've never read any of his plays. I wish I had; I wish I had.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

John Updike - Mar. 18, 1932 - Jan. 27, 2009 - RIP



When I read "Leaves" sometime back in the sixties, sitting on a bench along a park in Lansing, Michigan, I was sure that nothing ever could be more perfect; I was wrong, but I still love to recall that "wow" feeling I had when I finished this short short story.

[Post-script Jan. 29: Tons of words have been written about Updike since his death. My favorite are by Verlyn Klinkenborg in today's New York Times: "You can read him for his books, but it's better to read him for his sentences, any one of which -- anywhere -- can rise up to startle you with its wry perfection."]

Monday, January 26, 2009

Material

A one and only kind of friend, using her bathroom wall as a scrapbook, has a couple years worth of blog material thereon.  (Don't forget you can click on any picture to enlarge it.)

Baudelaire

Baudelaire defined poetry perfectly as "something a little vague which leaves room for conjecture."

That also, coincidentally, defines Bob Dylan's post-electric lyrics to the max.

Baudelaire also wrote:  "It is at once by and through poetry, by and through music that the soul catches a glimpse of the splendors which lie on the other side of the grave: and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, those tears are not the proof of excessive enjoyment; they are much more the sign of an irritated melancholy, a nervous postulation, a nature exiled in an imperfect world which would like to take possession at once on this very earth of a revealed paradise.  Thus the principle of poetry is strictly and simply human aspiration towards a higher beauty and this enthusiasm which is completely independent of passion, which is the intoxication of the heart, and of truth which is the field of reason.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

May Sarton; Nelson Cemetery; Nelson, NH

I loved reading her journals -- Journal of A Solitude -- and then a string of others. She made her own life seem so pretty, taking careful notice of nature and beauty. Two years after her 1995 death, a biography by a woman named Margot Peters was published; it struck me as authoritative and truthful; it portrayed May Sarton as a nasty person, someone you'd never want to meet. Who knew? Who knows? Everyone slants, everyone lies. Only fiction is true.

Her grave marker was designed by one of her friends. I think it verges on ugly. May Sarton, who had it set before her death, thought it stunningly beautiful. It is, at least, out of the ordinary, and that's generally a good thing.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Donald Hall

I read every single one.  I liked many.  I loved some.

My dear friend Ellen's mother, who died this past June, lived in Danbury, New Hampshire, just around the corner from Donald Hall, so I drove past his house several times when taking Ellen to visit her mother.  I stared and stared and stared, as if I might spy a new poem in the yard, while trying to not run off the road.

I feel closer to the poems of his wife, Jane Kenyon, who was nineteen years younger than her husband, and who died in 1995.  Ellen and I once visited her grave in Proctor Cemetery in the adjacent town of Andover but I had neglected to bring my camera.

Here's an architecturally amazing Donald Hall villanelle; it appeared in The New Yorker after the book of selected poems pictured above was published; as in many of his poems, the subject of this one is Jane Kenyon:

NYMPH AND SHEPHERD

She died a dozen times before I died,
And kept on dying, nymph of fatality.
I could not die but once although I tried.

I envied her.  She whooped, she laughed, she cried
As she contrived each fresh mortality,
Numberless lethal times before I died.

I plunged, I plugged, I twisted, and I sighed
While she achieved death's Paradise routinely.
I lagged however zealously I tried.

She writhed, she bucked, she rested, and, astride,
She posted, cantering on top of me
At least a hundred miles until I died.

I'd never blame you if you thought I lied
About her deadly prodigality.
She died a dozen times before I died
Who could not die so frequently.  I tried.

Friday, January 23, 2009

e e cummings; Forest Hills Cemetery; Boston

No certain poem is my favorite because I have many favorites; but the one I'll copy below, written by the man buried beneath the stone pictured above, is the one this agnostic has had tucked in his wallet since 1969 when a friend (thank you Bill Haushalter) first read it to me in Ann Arbor.  The very best moments of my life were lived within and described by this poem:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any -- lifted from the no
of all nothing -- human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears wake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Thursday, January 22, 2009

The Hoarding Series

Here's a break from tombstones and books.  Since the late eighties Mark and I have tried to be with our Vermont friends Bob and Sue at Christmas time in Montreal.  We've missed a few years ... went to Boston one year, to New York City in 2001, and to Newport another year.  I like pictures with hoardings in the background.





Bob and Sue, aside from their regular jobs, raise alpacas on their ten-acre Coyote Creek Farm in Vermont.  Alpacas are absolutely adorable.  Bob and Sue are also.  I miss them every day.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Cool Alert #2

There's a really cute video on www.momlogic.com.  Under "Daily Logic" on the Homepage.

Supplication in Connemara Cemetery


Monday, January 19, 2009

A Brand New Poem

"Night Poem"


For all my life
I've been filled with poems
though I seldom took the time
to shake them loose;
did not measure them for meter,
did not play with their rhyme.

Now they crowd my sleep,
mess with my dreams.
Mornings come
and it seems
I've had no rest.

Brilliant metaphors
lie scattered on the floor;
turns of phrases
worth dying for
walk out the door.


Finally, last night,
awake again at three,
I lifted back the cover
and turned on the light.
I reached for my pen
and that's when
carefully crafted sentences
scurried away,
seeking the dark
like cockroaches.




Cool Alert

You oughta click on the BlueGal blog on the right and watch her video "She Ponders His Legacy".  She's excellent.  Probably NSFW until -- hip hip hooray -- just after noon tomorrow, especially if you work for the guvmint as I do.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

James Dean; Fairmount, Indiana

Four or five years back my brother Bernard and I met at the Indianapolis Airport, rented a car, and headed north to attend the biannual family reunion.  I suggested that we take a detour eastward so that I could visit James Dean's grave.  "Weren't you there not all that long ago?" he asked.  "I was there in 1992 as well as 1962, but in the recent instance my camera malfunctioned and in 1962 I didn't have a camera with me.  If I have no picture of such an event, it's as if it doesn't count."  

Movie stars are not really my thing but I've always had a soft spot for James Dean simply because he grew up not far from where I grew up.

My memory has always told me that I saw "Rebel Without A Cause" on Sept. 30, 1955.  And I recall that my buddy, Gary Miller, who was 18 to my 15, and who drove us the twelve miles to the nearest movie house, mentioned that he'd heard on the radio earlier that day that Dean had just been killed in a car crash.

Very unlikely!  While it's true that James Dean was killed on Sept. 30, "Rebel Without A Cause" wasn't released until October 27th!

Why had my mind tricked me into a lie?  Have I simply slipped into romanticisms that have caused me to embellish experiences?  Gary most likely did tell me that James Dean had been killed, but probably didn't say it had happened that very day.

Clearly, I'm not to be trusted.

What if I'd written a memoir ... titled Literary Crushes & Grave Matters maybe ... and innocently mentioned that coincidence?  What if the memoir was so charmingly written that Queen Oprah picked it for her book club?  Then some sharp-witted reporter would come along, log on to Wikipedia, & easily dig up the embarrassing truth.  I'd find myself enmeshed in scandal as James Frey with his A Million Little Pieces found himself and now Herman Rosenblat with his Angel at the Fence finds himself.  Oprah would denounce me. 

 "I'm terribly disappointed in Mr. Fitzgerald," she'd say.  "He owes me an apology."

And god knows, since there's no place to hide in Oprahville, I'd start trembling.

I'll need to be very careful here on out.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

I Couldn't Resist

George Fitzgerald, Autumn 1945

Friday, January 16, 2009

Gull Pond in Winter

It's bitter cold and the blogger has a bitter cold.  He had to take a sick day at work.  He's going to lie in bed and feel lousy and finish a re-reading of a marvelous short novel The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers; he'd forgotten how great she is.  Earlier he watched a movie from Netflix called "Cowboys & Angels" set in Limerick, Ireland.  It was really good and the movie-watcher cried at the end when the character named Vincent pulls the St. Christopher medal out of his pocket when he doesn't pass airport security.  Vincent's friend had, unbeknownst to him, put it there. When tears came to the movie-watcher's eyes his dog Jodie came and tried to comfort him.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Samuel Beckett 1906-1989

Photo credit:  Jane Bown (from a postcard)
Irish, lived in Paris, won the Nobel prize in 1969. Outlook: bleak. He wrote "there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."

When an interviewer remarked, as they walked in a park, that it was "the sort of day that makes one glad to be alive," Beckett demurred, "Oh, I don't think I would go quite so far as to say that."

He and his wife are buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. He stipulated that their gravestone "could be any color, so long as it's grey"

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Henry David Thoreau/Thomas Merton

On January 2, 2007, a mild sunny day, Ellen and I went to the site of Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond to check out the environs chosen by the guy who wrote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

What I learned was that his cabin had been just a couple miles from Concord, close enough that he could drop in on his parents and probably have a hearty meal and free laundry service, or get drunk and convivial in a tavern ... well, it was sort of disappointing, rather like when I learned that Thomas Merton had had a long-running affair with a woman while presenting himself to the world as a solitude-loving monk at the Abbey of Gethsemane.



Monday, January 12, 2009

Stuff

I used to pin things to walls.  Now I just post them on my blog.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Tennessee Williams - Part II

Reclining Woman outside Atlantic House in Provincetown

When, a couple years back, there was a feature on Tennessee Williams' Provincetown summer in the Sunday Times, another work-friend, Mary Ann -- not the Marianne of an earlier post who got the Tennessee Williams autograph -- asked me if I had seen the article and if I liked his plays.  I gushed:  "Yes, I saw it, and yes I love him!  Even just the titles of his plays are like poetry.  And I never walk by the A-House in Provincetown without thinking of him cause he hung out there and it was on the porch there that he met Frank Merlo, the love of his life."

"I never went in there ... what's that place like?" Mary Ann asked.  "From things I heard about it I'd have been afraid to step foot in the door."

"Oh, you'd 'a been okay.  It's just a big dance bar.  Loud music.  Crowded.  Everybody sweaty.  And then there's a little cruise bar off to the side."

"But what about upstairs?  I heard that some pretty wild things went on up there."

I hesitated at how to put it.  "Well, it was Provincetown's version of kinky, I suppose, but nothing compared to what I'd seen in bars in Manhattan or Munich.  That upstairs room was called The Macho Bar.  It was kind of silly to me.  And you wouldn't 'a gone up there anyway ... you'd 'a been afraid of the dark at the top of the stairs, cause it was barely lit up there ... you'd 'a just gone to the dance bar on the first floor where the music was blaring.  And I mean blaring.  I've always assumed, by the way, that the A-House is where I got tinnitus."

At the mention of tinnitus Mary Ann's face took on an expression of aghast!

I was wondering: What the hell?

"Oh, stop!  Stop!" she begged, covering her ears with her hands to shut me out.  "I don't want to know about that kind of stuff."

Soon enough her misunderstanding dawned on me.  "It's not an STD!" I said.  "It's when you have ringing in your ears!  The tiny antennae in my ears got damaged listening to Mick Jagger on the A-House's gigantic speakers."

Man succumbs to tinnitus outside Atlantic House in Provincetown

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Castlegregory, Ireland; October 1999


You may be sure some William Trevor characters were living behind this lace curtain.  It may have been a window of the rectory of St. Mary's Church; I forget.  My dad was born and raised in Castlegregory.  Photo by Abby Orton.  

Friday, January 9, 2009

Tennessee Williams - An Autograph

One of my work-friends, Marianne, was at Westchester Community College in the mid-seventies. Her boyfriend was an orderly at Stony Brook Lodge in Ossining. One day he noticed a limousine pull up out front and guessed it must be Tennessee Williams coming to visit his sister Rose.


When in her teens Rose had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. The times being what they were, a prefrontal lobotomy, with the usual disastrous results, was performed. Rose spent the remainder of her life in this or that institution.


The playwright's love and care for his damaged sister has always been very touching to me. A critic once observed that all his female leads were based on Rose; that strikes me as an astute observation. That her famous brother so tenderly loved and cared for her makes me love him beyond his poetic nature, beyond his uniqueness, beyond his immaculate plays, beyond his poems, beyond his stories, beyond his couple of novels.


I saw a picture of Rose in that recently published thick book of Tennessee's notes. She was prettied up in a white dress sitting on a lawn chair -- a beautiful southern belle with a cigarette in her hand. That she was allowed to enjoy cigarettes makes me feel a little bit better for her.


Marianne's boyfriend knew she was crazy about theater, knew that she'd love to have Tennessee's autograph. He had nothing for Mr. Williams to sign except the blank flip side of the form on the clipboard he was carrying, a form whose heading was RECORD OF ELECTRIC SHOCK TREATMENT. This sweet autograph on such a form strikes me as ... what? ... poignant? ... sad? ... nothing remarkable? ... I don't quite know.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Willa Cather, Old Burying Ground

This is in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.  If you can click on this picture to make it larger you'll see the more modest stone of her companion, Edith Lewis (who died after Cather).

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Allen Ginsberg

"I Saw Allen Ginsberg"


mark and i are
in a bus station diner in White River Junction
on a Sunday night in November
when these four guys walk in
and i say to mark
that my god one of america's greatest poets
just walked into
this bus station diner
here in White River Junction
and he says
well it's not as if Linda Gray walked in
and i say who's she
and he says she's on Dallas
and he doesn't think anyhow
that it's very likely
that great poets eat poet dinners
in places like
a bus station diner
in places like
White River Junction.

the bus station diner
is not a cool diner
not one of those
old bright chrome-filled diners
where some bee-hived curt efficient waitress
who's been there twenty-some years
will sass you
but this is rather
a tacky imitation,
a run down place,
in a run down town.

i shake the poet's hand
tell him he is great
thank him for some great reading.
And what do you do the poet asks
and i say my friends and i
have a restaurant in Essex Junction
-- that's over by Burlington.
And then the poet says i look familiar
and wonders "are you one
of David Dellinger's sons?"
i wish i am but ain't;
i'm from the midwest and know Dellinger
only from newspaper stories
devoured
a long time sixties ago
in various Michigan versions of
this bus station diner
in White River Junction.


Then I return to my seat
in the bus station diner
in White River Junction
& try not to stare
at the man who wrote
one of the greatest,
one of the greatest of all,
try not to stare
at the man
who
wrote
the amazing
"Howl".
-- November, 1986

Monday, January 5, 2009

Aruba - Poor Pedro

Forest Hills Cemetery; Jamaica Plain, Boston

I took a picture of this monument just because I thought it was a beautiful sculpture. I had no idea who Kitchell Snow was. Later I learned that on June 13, 1923 he was the first pilot to land a plane in Boston (on the site of what would become Logan Airport). Thirty five days later he was killed in a plane crash.

(Among the line of Snow family tombstones in the background is one for this same Kitchell Snow so I suppose this monument is technically a cenotaph ... and yet, not quite.)

Along Friary Street; Kilkenny, Ireland

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Homage to Genet/Homage to Drew

Jean Genet (1910-1986) is buried in Morocco.  As much as I'd like to visit his grave it isn't likely that I'll ever get there.  Meanwhile I've placed my favorite picture of him atop an installation (I like to be pretentious in my terms) in a corner of my bedroom.  I often read a few paragraphs in any of his novels, my favorite being Miracle of the Rose.  No one, I'm certain, has ever come close to writing like Genet; no one could skim as brilliantly as his pen did along the fine border where surrealism meets reality.  He is like the most-skilled-by-far tight-rope walker; he'll go for hundreds and hundreds of pages.  And he'll never stumble.  And he'll never fall. 

Details of the installation:  At bottom, a set of two drawers I bought at a yard sale in Essex Junction, Vermont.  On it in the foreground are a couple of small attractive stones I intend to take with me the next time I visit a grave so I can, as the Jewish people do, leave a token of my visit.  To the left of those stones, indistinguishable in the picture, is a beautiful piece of tree-branch -- it looks as if carved by an artist -- which I found on a hike up in Truro.  

Above it is a wooden box; I think Mark's father gave it to me; in red and black ink it advertises, on two sides:

ROAST BEEF
Parboiled and Steam Roasted
packed for
Libby, McNeill & Libby, USA
Product of Uruguay

Within this box I have the Modern Library six-volume edition of Proust's In Search of Lost Time -- certainly the handiest version, and probably the best translation -- as well as a manuscript book sent to me by a man in Japan after I'd sold him a rare book about rock and roll that he wanted badly.  Atop the beef box is a manicure scissors, always easy for me to find.

Then, moving the eye upward, comes a little chest of drawers that Mark gave me for Christmas or a birthday a long time ago.  I love it.  I like to keep things very organized.  I would not like it if a rubber band was in the paper clip drawer or vice versa.

Atop it, on the right, are two jewelry boxes.  Do they even make such things anymore, especially those designed for men?  The bottom one was given to me by my fellow employees at Western Union in Lansing, Michigan, in maybe 1967 when I moved on to another job.  The initials GF are stamped in gold on the top in a font I never liked.  Kind of tacky.  The box above it, which is exquisite, was given to me by my friend Dennis in 1965 or 1966 for Christmas.  Though made in Germany, it was noted that the leather for the top and the band on the front came from Spain.  One or the other of us took to calling this my Spanish box of Spanish leather, after the Dylan song "Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather" -- and of course we thought we were just too cool beyond cool to associate anything with words written by the lyric-god himself; it wouldn't have been possible to quote Dylan too often. 

The slip-cased Dutton paperbacks on the left are Lawrence Durrell's Justine, Mountolive, Balthazar, and Clea -- collectively called The Alexandria Quartet.  They were one of the free offerings I got for joining a book club in the early sixties.  As much as I've loved this little boxed set I never got around to actually reading the novels until June of 1998.  Well worth the wait!

Here -- you can see in more detail:

Drew sent me the Richard Avedon picture of Genet below on a postcard on Dec. 21, 1979; considering Genet's penchant for both petty thievery and grand larceny, Drew could not have chosen a more perfect vehicle to send me the "Police Log" item he'd glued to the other side of the card:


Below, two of the culprits, Andrew and Patricia, in a booth photo.  Color added by Drew.  Drew is amazing.  He can make a cheap photo better.  He can make an entire day better.  He can make your mood better.  He can make your life better.  He can make everything better.


Thursday, January 1, 2009

Marcel Proust - Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise; 3/9/92

"The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience.  None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."  
--- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

A thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed [my] life on March 9, 1992; look how happy I was paying respects at my favorite writer's grave, and how sunny the day was, and what a nice green shirt I have on -- I loved that shirt!