...Grinding the skin off earth
Earth bleeds her raw true darkness
A land naked now as a wound
That sun swabs and dabs...
Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet, 1979
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...Grinding the skin off earth Earth bleeds her raw true darkness A land naked now as a wound That sun swabs and dabs... Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet, 1979  "How far that little candle throws his beams! " William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1596 "mutation of weathers and seasons, a windfall composing the floor it rots into." Seamus Heaney, North, 1975 *matter my silence is like glass blown by an apprentice flawed and cracked but now I have learned to form silence and next time I will do it right perfectly Webb Chiles, Artist of words and wind, 1975   “The quality it had now, in fresh untempered sunlight, was neither faerie nor austere; the changing shadows of dusk and midnight had vanished with the darkness and the rain, and walls and roof and towers were bathed in the radiance that comes only in the first hours of the day, soft, new-washed, the delicate aftermath of dawn. The people who slept within must surely bear some imprint of this radiance in themselves, must turn instinctively to the light seeping through the shutters, while the ghostly dreams and sorrows of the night slipped away, finding sanctuary in the unwakened forest trees the sun had not yet touched.” Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, 1957 ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. - Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 On Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. 1946 "So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is light." Samuel Beckett, Watt, 1953 “Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.” Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759 "In the dark belly of the valley A coming and going music Cutting the bedrock deeper To earth-nerve, a scalpel of music" Ted Hughes, River, 1983 "The Atlantic has bitten into the island's neck like a stoat, and will in time consume it all. Aran is a dying moment." Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 1986 A brown musically moving beauty, the earth’s fullness Slides towards the sea. An escape Of earth-serpent, with all its hoards, casting the land, like an old skin, Pulling its body from under the eye. Ted Hughes, River, 1983  "How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet." Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931 If you would experience a landscape, you must go alone into it and sit down somewhere quietly and wait for it to come in its own good time. Paul Gruchow, The Necessity of Empty Places, 1988 "We can walk between two places and in so doing establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends" Thomas A Clark, In Praise of Walking, 2016 “We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minuets we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom.” Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943 “Each of us, I suspect, cherishes a particular landscape that outwardly reflects some all-too-invisible condition within. Its very topography gives colour, contour, dimension to otherwise inaccessible areas of inner reality. Endows them with palpable configuration.” Gustaf Sobin, Luminous Debris, 1997 "Beautiful with a hint of secrecy which haunts it, as the memory of a dark and tender sadness clouds the brilliance of a summer day." Lilias Rider Haggard, A Norfolk Notebook, 1946 limited edition notebook "Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things." Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1929  "...like the dream of a world that is visible before it takes shape as a reality." Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night, 1938 passage is now available to pre-order from another place press Introductory essay by Alison Morris all royalties from the book will be donated to the Anaphylaxis Campaign, a UK charity who raise awareness of, and support people at risk of severe allergies.  “He saw the sunlight leave the grass like an eye suddenly closed.” Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor, 1993 |