Wednesday Evening - Waiting for Thunder...
"I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness;
I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too.
I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky,
I somehow feel that everything will change for the better,
that this cruelty too shall end,
that peace and tranquility will return once more."
~ Anne Frank ~
Thursday afternoon
Linking to Skywatch Friday
♫ ♫ ♫
Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Up the road around the bend
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
In the last outback, at the world's end
(From Bob Dylan’s Ain’t Talkin’ – Album: Modern Times)
“Art is in the Eye of the Beholder”…
Did you know?
… that the person credited with coining the saying “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, an Irish novelist whose light romantic fiction was popular throughout the English-speaking world in the late 19th century. The line occurs in Molly Bawn (1878). (More famous authors before her expressed much the same thought in other words, though…)
(Sources: The Phrase Finder & Wikipedia)
See more reflection photograpy at:
Weekend Reflections
For me, ever since my own childhood, lilacs in bloom (and that scent in the air) is very much associated with the beginning of summer. This week in June is also the end of the school year in Sweden; and the beginning of the summer holidays (for the children lasting from now until mid August or so).
Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
~Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine~
‘But the really significant thing was the inscription on the tomb. Rex Arthurus. Britannorum Rex.’
He looks expectantly at Ruth, who is frantically working out the Latin.
Elly Griffiths – Dying Fall
(#5 in the Ruth Galloway series)
“Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and God; for men always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache.”
G.K. Chesterton
The Club of Queer Trades/ Chapter 5…
The Club of Queer Trades is a collection of six short stories by G. K. Chesterton, first published in 1905. Each story is centered on someone who has invented a new and quite unique way of earning their living (a “queer trade”).
Linking to Teaser Tuesday
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
“The rails themselves had already been lifted, and were laid along the side of the track awaiting collection. There was a sad sense of abandonment about the place, haunted by the imaginary ghosts of all the passengers who must once have passed this way, the distant echo of forgotten steam trains lost in the mists of railway history.”
Peter May – Runaway
The setting of Peter May’s new novel shifts between 2015 and 1965; the scene above is from 1965.
This is a postcard I recently received from a friend in England, which came to mind when I read the quote above – an old station and railway no longer in use…
The novel and the postcard both connect to my own memories from holidays in Britain back in 1969-1974. My dad was a railway and steam trains enthusiasts, and every family holiday, whether in Sweden or Britain, always included various abandoned dilapidated old stations, as well as steam train museums… Peter May manages to bring those memories (and others) to life without using photos! I’ve not yet finished the book – will probably be back with a review when I have.
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
“She found it absolutely necessary to speak to him instantly. She did not care in the least what nonsense it might make, or what dislocation it might inflict on the narrative.”
Virginia Woolf – Orlando: A Biography
I’m enjoying this classic a lot more than I thought I would. Not very far to go to finish it now (35 minutes or so, my Kindle suggests).
(Because I’m reading on Kindle, I pick the teaser from just about where I am in the book, rather than open it to a ‘random’ page.)
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
. . .
‘It was dark and she was two door doors down, so what she actually saw was…?’
‘Silhouette of a tall figure in a cloak, carrying a holdall.’Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) – The Silkworm
. . .
“One day he was adding a line or two with enormous labour to ‘The Oak Tree, A Poem’, when a shadow crossed the tail of his eye. It was no shadow, he soon saw, but the figure of a very tall lady in riding hood and mantle crossing the quadrangle on which his room looked out.”
Virginia Woolf – Orlando: A Biography
. . .
… As I mentioned yesterday, I’m reading Orlando because it was referred to in The Silkworm (recently finished) …
“I collect old portraits. They're all just interesting pictures of people, and you just kind of wonder who they were and what they were. There's a guy - I don't know who he is, but he's wearing a suit. He's got his arms folded, and he looks like he sold insurance or something. I'm just wondering why someone painted him.
”Ellen DeGeneres
“I collect records. And cats. I don't have any cats right now. But if I'm taking a walk and I see a cat, I'm happy.”
"Haruki Murakami
“I don't collect any memorabilia. I wish I'd have kept everything I had. But who knew you had to keep it. Just gave it away. And we lost so much and we didn't look after a lot of it.”
Ringo Starr
“But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them.”
Christopher Columbus
“I collect watches because I'm always late, and I need to know exactly how late I'm going to be - in order to come up with a good excuse.”
Colin Hanks
“I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store.”
Michael Gambon
- - -
I spent a weekend out at the House again. Two years we’ve spent rummaging through that house, and there are still surprises hiding… I’ve told you before that I found lots of still valid stamps 1½-2 years ago while going through dad’s study. About three months ago I decided to use those for postcrossing (link to my first post about that back in May).
This weekend I decided to look through some boxes we found later, also related to dad’s stamp collection. They seemed to contain mostly first-day covers and foreign stamps. The main reason I started looking through them was that I was curious if there might also be some postcards. Very few of those – BUT in among all the envelopes of foreign stamps (mostly from the rest of the Nordic countries) I found more unused Swedish stamps as well. And when I say more, I mean lots. Probably at least as many more as those already found!
I can maybe (sort of) understand the kind of stamp collecting where you put “one of each” into albums in some sort of order. Here, however, we are talking stamps kept in their original little semitransparent envelopes (usually two of each issue/booklet), each stored with the brochure they were ordered from, in the envelope they came in; and the envelopes in boxes; and the boxes stacked in a wardrobe…
I’m not a stamp collector. I may be committing some kind of sacrilege, but what I do with stamps is (re)sort them according to nominal value, and some perhaps according to topic – so that I know where to find them when I want to use them.
Now please excuse me. I have some postcards to write…
This week (in honor of her brother-in-law turning 50), Deb at Booking Through Thursday asks us to:
“… please pick up your nearest book or whatever book you’re currently reading, and turn to page 50 and then share the first 50 words [or so].”
The book I’m reading at the moment is Memories of the Curlew by Helen Spring. I probably haven’t got as far as page 50 yet (I’m reading it on my Kindle, no page numbers, and I’m not wasting energy on maths!) but here’s a teaser from a page recently read, anyway:
Meilyr closed his eyes and tried to conjure the image again, letting his mind sink deep into his dream, when the gentle form of the sweet babe asleep in her crib had dissolved into the scampering child, with thick blonde curling hair and clear blue eyes, who brandished her wooden sword like a boy and climbed recklessly up the mountainside.
(That’s 60 words but I did not want to break off mid-sentence.)
I think it was Scriptor Senex who recommended this historical novel, some months ago. It’s based on the life of Princess Gwenllian, known as the 'Welsh Warrior Princess.' Daughter to the king of Gwynnedd, born in 1096, 30 years after the Norman invasion, she was predicted by the bard Meilyr to become a great leader.
I’ve hardly even got to the prediction yet but am looking forward to learning more :)
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.”
~ Steve Jobs ~
Whoever may deserve the most credit… After the initial hiccups, my new broadband is finally up and running. I’ve also managed to install the new wireless router; and the computer, the mobile phone and the Kindle all seem to be connecting as they should now. Phew… :)
“In many ways Anne and I had been two unrelated planets, separately orbiting the fiery star of the Stansburys.” (p. 25)
“We were all so busy longing for the war to be over that we never stopped to think how things would be when it was.” (p. 41)
Martin Davies, The Year After {Kindle}
Set in Britain after WWI, this book is very different from the previous two that I read by the same author (The Conjuror’s Bird and The Unicorn Road). Those two in turn were not like each other either. I find it very interesting (and promising) when an author is capable of such breadth in his writing.
I’ll be back with a review when I’ve finished it.
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
“Without his camera he didn’t see the small poetic vignettes of war, he saw the whole God-awful mess.”
From The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton
(2012)
Just realized that this is the third Tuesday I’m quoting from the same book. Two weeks ago I had just started it, now I’m getting close to the end (85% on my Kindle, the printed book is about 600 pages). I’m still finding it a very intriguing read, the story keeps taking unexpected turns. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out… Something turns up to slightly change the picture.The quote above was my last highlight before I put the book down after a rather long reading session this afternoon. I think it may be significant. It’s so easy to think a frozen moment (like a photograph, or a couple of sentences we happen to overhear) tells the whole story… But does it really?
As amateur photographer, I also see the truth in this quote… So often I focus my camera on a detail; and in blogging I do the same in words. Cropped, enlarged, blurred or sharpened… The reality I present on my blog is ever the tweaked version. Even straight-out-of-the-camera shots are never “the whole picture”.
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
“Later, Laurel would wonder if it all might have turned out differently had she gone a little more slowly. If, perhaps, the whole terrible thing might have been averted had she taken greater care.”
From The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton
(2012)
I’ve just begun reading this book (on the Kindle), the quote is from only a few pages into the story. I liked Kate Morton’s three previous novels very much, so am hoping I will find this one a good read too.
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers
Among the blogs on my dashboard reading list there is the mysterious Ten Thousand Questions, which keeps asking daily questions without collecting any answers (or at least never publishing any). This week they’ve been asking annoying ones to suggest my life is full of deep dark secrets:
What are a few of your biggest secrets? Are they things that nobody knows, or things that everybody knows but no one talks about? Do you keep more secrets now, or did you keep more secrets when you were much younger? What's changed over time in your situation, or in your attitude about keeping things secret? Do you worry about people thinking less of you if they found out your secrets? Are you concerned that some of your secrets could impact your job or your relationships? What big, guilty secret did your family share when you were growing up? Do you still carry shame associated with your family's secrets? Are you the person that everyone tells their secrets to, or are you always the last to find out?
I very rarely write down answers to the TTQ questions – only give them a few seconds of brain time. This week, my brain kept giving the spontaneous frustrated response: “WHAT secrets?!”
Still, I wonder if these questions might possibly have made their way into a dream I woke up from this morning… For some obscure reason, I was subjected to some kind of theraphy with a most annoying therapist who kept asking questions out of context – not that I can recall now what the context was supposed to be, nor what kind of annoying questions it was I was asked – you know how it is with dreams! Anyway not much remained when I woke up but the frustration: “but… but… but…” (The dream also reminding of a clever attorney questioning a witness in a court of law; or some conversation from Alice in Wonderland.)
Another factor behind the dream may have been some frustrating talks of different (and yet in some ways similar) kind lately with pharmacy and health care staff, trying to sort out a complication with a certain prescription. (No secrets involved, just too complicated to explain here as I hardly understand it myself in my own language.) It’s probably sorted now (I’ll see next week when I try going to the pharmacy again). But it involved a lot of Wonderland-twisted nonsense arguing.
Anyway, the week’s package of prying questions from TTQ reminded me of a little book I bought some thirty years ago, hardly more than a pamphlet, entitled Secrets, by Paul Tournier (a Swiss Christian physician and author, 1898-1986).
Wise words from this little book:
Freedom is what makes the individual. Keeping a secret is an early assertion of freedom; telling it to someone that one chooses is going to be a later assertion of freedom, of even greater value. He who cannot keep a secret is not free. But he who can never reveal it is not free either.
While I’m not the kind of person who talks with anyone about everything, I also don’t think I carry a lot of big dark secrets that no one must ever know. (But then if I did, it’s hardly likely I’d suddenly blurt that out all over the internet, is it? Which leaves you none the wiser.)
As for the last of the TTQ questions: “Are you the person that everyone tells their secrets to, or are you always the last to find out?” - I’d say that ironically, I think it’s been a bit of both. Some people tell me things because they know I’ve little interest in idle gossip. On the other hand, sometimes I’m the last to find out, for the same reason!
---
PS. The two photos are from a gardening expo last year. (I guess my mind wandered to “secret gardens”…)
