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    4 walks in cardinal directions / hertfordshire



    ...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


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    meander / afon conwy / 2017-2023



    So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is light.


    ​Samuel Beckett, Watt, 1953


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    oileáin árann / postscript



    ​Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.



    Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759

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    sketches / oileáin árann



    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

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    mapping a rivulet / expanded / moor mill pits



    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 history of sunlight / 8 hours / hertfordshire

    Picture




    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