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
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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 "The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand." Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972 "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 “No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.” Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2005 "Erasure is never merely a matter of making things disappear: there is always some detritus strewn about in the aftermath, some bruising to the surface from which word or image has been removed, some reminder of the violence done to make the world look new again. Whether rubbed away, crossed out or reinscribed, the rejected entity has a habit of returning, ghostlike: if only in the marks that usurp its place and attest to its passing." Brian Dillon, The Revelation of Erasure, Tate Etc. Issue 8, 2006 “Blessed are the forgetful.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886 “In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.” Rachel Louise Carson (1907 - 1964) “His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.” Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943 "The light touched something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald" Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931 "When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature." Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 1862  “Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.” Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2000 “To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges.” Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs & Human Imagination, 2001 |
