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Wandering awed on a splintered wreck

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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The crow’s eye

When I roused, one of the crows took off immediately. But the other one cocked his eye at me and looked me up and down. His hard dull eye was the whole history of the natural world taking me in, sizing me up and classifying me a fool.

Walter Mosley, Black Betty

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Eskra rose daily at sunrise and went as usual about her work. She fetched the water and mucked out the horse and fed the animals and the remaining chickens. At the start of the week she baked the rationed black bread. But something within her had changed. A wheel in the middle of her was pulling tighter the strings that held every part of her, and she stared out the kitchen window and imagined what it would be like to let that wheel loose, to let the parts of her be flung upon the wind that came down wild off the mountains a hunter of souls.

Paul Lynch, The Black Snow (Quercus, 2014)

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Tamara de Lempicka, The Straw Hat (1930), Oil on wood, 35 x 27 cm

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When you remember that only a smallish proportion of the cost of dealing with climate change will be borne by governments, it becomes clear that this is not a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on foreign aid and essential public services. It is a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on coal, oil, roads, farm subsidies, environmental destruction and unprovoked wars. We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.

George Monbiot, Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning

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The ground where she sat was turfy and springy. She leaned over a little tussock and examined it carefully, teasing out with her fingers the tiny plants of which it was composed, the mosses and the lichens. The combination of smallness and complexity in the plants fascinated her. She put her head right down on the tussock as though it were a pillow, and closed her eyes, listened to the sea, the birds, the wind. She never regretted having come to live here. She opened her eyes and saw, inches from her face, a tiny spider scale a blade of grass.

Deirdre Madden, Nothing Is Black (Faber and Faber, 1994)

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Same.

Isabelle Huppert in Violette Nozière (Chabrol, 1978)

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What a good man

Friends saw a different Huxley than critics did. To Sybille Bedford, Aldous was a man transformed; he had developed a godlike assurance, a serenity. He gave a sense of peace and a natural sweetness mixed with an Olympian calm: a saint without the unctuousness. Huxley’s evolution from an agitated pacifist to a calm, clear-minded mystic—[D.H.] Lawrence would have enjoyed this—was noticed by others. When Cyril Connolly interviewed Huxley for Picture Post, he remarked, “What is much more remarkable … is the radiance of serenity and loving-kindness on his features; one no longer feels ‘what a clever man’ but ‘what a good man,’ a man at peace with himself.”

David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (Bloomsbury, 1989)

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The Newark Advocate, Ohio, July 23, 1943

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3. Why do you write?

I hate writing about my writing because I have nothing to say about it. I have nothing to say about it because I can't remember what goes on when I'm doing it. That time is like small pieces cut out of my brain. It's not time I myself have lived. I can remember details of the rooms and places where I’ve written, the circumstances, the other things I did before and after, but not the process itself. Writing about writing requires self-consciousness; writing itself requires the abdication of it. 

Margaret Atwood, ‘Nine Beginnings’, in The Writer On Her Work, edited by Janet Sternburg (Virago Press, 1992)

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The ancient sky was charged for him with the memory of the countless men and women who had also looked at the stars down the years, down the centuries. Now they were so completely forgotten that to think of them, as he did, was not true remembrance but an act of imagination. That this would be his fate too did not disturb him, but consoled him rather. He felt close to these men who worshipped strange gods, to these women who spoke dead languages.

Deirdre Madden, Authenticity

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Ivan Aivazovsky, Winter Landscape, 1876

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It was a deliciously hot spring day – a day when there is both sun and crispness in the air and flowers look young and well groomed and dewy, not swooning and languid. And beech leaves are light as spring muslins, not black-green shrouds as later they come to be.

Molly Keane, The Rising Tide