Yesterday the light was so beautiful, that glorious golden autumn light that is low and the sky and creates great shadows through the tunnels of trees where I live. I went for a walk in the morning and I could even feel the sun slightly warm on my face. I was quite excited at the thought that the next wee while might be just like this but today it is pouring rain of course. Thou I must admit when the weather is really bad, thick snow or heavy rain, I do enjoy the feeling that it somehow excuses me from doing anything at all. In some ways I'm dreading the winter arriving but maybe it's because the last two winters were so harsh and it was also when my grandfather died. I remember the roads were so bad that we were walking everywhere in the snow, to the hospital, to visit my grandmother and I think I was still recovering from being really worn out when I was still working at the hospital. So perhaps this winter will be better. I just have to look forward to trying to be cosy. It's already so cold today that although I'm in the house with the heating on, I'm sitting writing this wearing a hat and scarf and two cashmere cardigans! This reminds me of something I read in The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard about winter. I seem to crave light and warmth these days though but maybe winter can become a more suitable season for me as I am a dreamer after all.

And we feel warm because it is cold out-of-doors. Further on…Baudelaire declares that dreamers like a severe winter. “Every year they ask the sky to send down as much snow, hail and frost as it can contain. What they really need are Canadian or Russian winters. Their own nests will be all the warmer, all the downier, all the better loved…” Like Edgar Allan Poe, a great dreamer of curtains, Baudelaire, in order to protect the winter-girt house from cold added “heavy draperies that hung down to the floor.” Behind dark curtains snow seems to be whiter. Indeed, everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate.

But here was the garden while it was still summer. I miss it when it's too cold to sit out there for breakfast or to read and I don't like seeing all the plants withering away but I know they are underground restoring themselves and will be back in the spring.















As autumn is the time for it I have planted lots of bulbs which will hopefully come up in the spring - fritillaria, irises, snowdrops...

Last week I finished reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf and it has immediately become a favorite of mine. As soon as I finished it I felt that I wanted to begin it again. It is probably the most beautiful book I've ever read. The structure is also extremely interesting and experimental, she was such a master and innovator of modernist writing. It is so unusual and psychological that I find it hard to explain but I recommend it very much. It takes a little while to get used to the unfamiliar structure and the intense poetry of it but once you are in it, it is amazing. I feel that she had this immense glorious ability to understand and to be able to express everything about life. It makes me so sad thinking of how much she suffered and how depressed she was all her life. So sad. I had started thinking about her again lately, after reading Mrs. Dalloway a few years ago, when I was reading Katherine Mansfield stories and then I was given this book. So I want to read everything now, I'm starting on Selected Letters next. I found the relationship between KM and VW very interesting. After Mansfield's death Woolf wrote in her diary -

At that one feels - what? A shock of relief? - a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little - then gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine wont read it. Katherine's my rival no longer....Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine....And I was jealous of her writing - the only writing I have ever been jealous of.

It's so sad that Mansfield died so young, I wonder what she would have written had she lived a full life. Her stories were so perfect and beautiful. I wonder if she was jealous of Woolf at all. I have read KMs Journal, which I loved, but that is made up of selected passages so I should look into her complete diaries to discover more.

‘Now I am hungry. I will call my setter. I think of crusts and bread and butter and white plates in a sunny room. I will go back across the fields. I will walk along this grass path with strong, even strides, now swerving to avoid the puddle, now leaping lightly to a clump. Beads of wet form on my rough skirt; my shoes become supple and dark. The stiffness has gone from the day; it is shaded with grey, green and umber. The birds no longer settle on the high road.
‘I return, like a cat or fox returning, whose fur is grey with rime, whose pads are hardened by the coarse earth. I push through the cabbages, making their leaves squeak and their drops spill. I sit waiting for my father’s footsteps as he shuffles down the passage pinching some herb between his fingers. I pour out cup after cup while the unopened flowers hold themselves erect on the table among the pots of jam, the loaves and the butter. We are silent.
‘I go then to the cupboard, and take the damp bags of rich sultanas; I lift the heavy flour on to the clean scrubbed kitchen table. I knead; I stretch; I pull, plunging my hands in the warm inwards of the dough. I let the cold water stream fanwise through my fingers. The fire roars; the flies buzz in a circle. All my currants and rices, the silver bags and the blue bags, are locked again in the cupboard. The meat is stood in the oven; the bread rises in a soft dome under the clean towel. I walk in the afternoon down to the river. All the world is breeding. The flies are going from grass to grass. The flowers are thick with pollen. The swans ride the stream in order. The clouds, warm now, sun- spotted, sweep over the hills, leaving gold in the water, and gold on the necks of the swans. Pushing one foot before the other, the cows munch their way across the field. I feel through the grass for the white-domed mushroom; and break its stalk and pick the purple orchid that grows beside it and lay the orchid by the mushroom with the earth at its root, and so home to make the kettle boil for my father among the just reddened roses on the tea-table.
‘But evening comes and the lamps are lit. And when evening comes and the lamps are lit they make a yellow fire in the ivy. I sit with my sewing by the table. I think of Jinny; of Rhoda; and hear the rattle of wheels on the pavement as the farm horses plod home; I hear traffic roaring in the evening wind. I look at the quivering leaves in the dark garden and think “They dance in London. Jinny kisses Louis”.’
‘How strange,’ said Jinny, ‘that people should sleep, that people should put out the lights and go upstairs. They have taken off their dresses, they have put on white nightgowns. There are no lights in any of these houses. There is a line of chimney-pots against the sky; and a street lamp or two burning, as lamps burn when nobody needs them. The only people in the streets are poor people hurrying. There is no one coming or going in this street; the day is over. A few policemen stand at the corners. Yet night is beginning. I feel myself shining in the dark. Silk is on my knee. My silk legs rub smoothly together. The stones of a necklace lie cold on my throat. My feet feel the pinch of shoes. I sit bolt upright so that my hair may not touch the back of the seat. I am arrayed, I am prepared. This is the momentary pause; the dark moment.(pp.64-65)

Meanwhile as I stand looking from the train window, I feel strangely, persuasively, that because of my great happiness (being engaged to be married) I am become part of this speed, this missile hurled at the city. I am numbed to tolerance and acquiescence. My dear sir, I could say, why do you fidget, taking down your suitcase and pressing into it the cap that you have worn all night? Nothing we can do will avail. Over us all broods a splendid unanimity. We are enlarged and solemnized and brushed into uniformity as with the grey wing of some enormous goose (it is a fine but colourless morning) because we have only one desire — to arrive at the station. I do not want the train to stop with a thud. I do not want the connection which has bound us together sitting opposite each other all night long to be broken. I do not want to feel that hate and rivalry have resumed their sway; and different desires. Our community in the rushing train, sitting together with only one wish, to arrive at Euston, was very welcome. But behold! It is over. We have attained our desire. We have drawn up at the platform. Hurry and confusion and the wish to be first through the gate into the lift assert themselves. But I do not wish to be first through the gate, to assume the burden of individual life. I, who have been since Monday, when she accepted me, charged in every nerve with a sense of identity, who could not see a tooth- brush in a glass without saying, “My toothbrush”, now wish to unclasp my hands and let fall my possessions, and merely stand here in the street, taking no part, watching the omnibuses, without desire; without envy; with what would be boundless curiosity about human destiny if there were any longer an edge to my mind. But it has none. I have arrived; am accepted. I ask nothing.
‘Having dropped off satisfied like a child from the breast, I am at liberty now to sink down, deep, into what passes, this omnipresent, general life. (How much, let me note, depends upon trousers; the intelligent head is entirely handicapped by shabby trousers.) One observes curious hesitations at the door of the lift. This way, that way, the other? Then individuality asserts itself. They are off. They are all impelled by some necessity. Some miserable affair of keeping an appointment, of buying a hat, severs these beautiful human beings once so united. For myself, I have no aim. I have no ambition. I will let myself be carried on by the general impulse. The surface of my mind slips along like a pale-grey stream, reflecting what passes. I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends. The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And, what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar — forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence. (pp. 74-75)

I must say thank you for getting the set in which I am blushing to the front page. I really appreciate all your nice compliments and messages. I'm not sure what to do with my 1432 private messages on here, I just sometimes randomly reply to a few but I'm pretty overwhelmed though I do love to read them and appreciate so much that people want to write to me. I hope you're all well.










Still missing my girls...



x

P.S. Go and look at this beautiful set of Sinnah. I think it is divine.