Sometimes, quite often actually, I feel that the time and work that it takes just to maintain our living bodies such as washing, dressing, eating, finding the time to sleep, is more than there is time for in each day. Not to mention that wretched inconvenience WORK (which of course I hope to make into something pleasurable and convenient one day) or those frivolous but certainly pleasurable and sometimes essential things like trying to make yourself look and feel nice. When I haven't been paying much attention to myself for a few days, it takes me hours to get back into any semblance of pleasant form. How long it takes to make ones skin and hair soft again and to get really clean and cut your nails and all those silly little things that half way through you start to wonder why you are doing them. I often, in my silly way, think that I would like to go and live in a forest or in a cave and completely shun nail cutting and washing of hair and trying to sort through mail and get rid of receipts and fill out time sheets and tidy the house. I know that is not very realistic though, I doubt I could survive for very long living in a cave in Scotland in the winter. But maybe if I really wanted to?! If only I could half merge with some clever wild animal like a fox or a crow. I was talking about this with my mother today. We thought it would be a great way to escape from certain unpleasant situations, if you could just metamorphose and run away out of them. However, we decided that it would probably be even harder to get everything you needed to get done if half the time you were turning into a fox. Lady into Fox. How inconvenient it would be to suddenly realise you had paws again when just that day you had been planning to make those little lace collars you had seen in the jewelry shop.
I just finished reading Speak, Memory which is the autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov. It was very interesting and there were many moving and delightful moments. There is also a really amusing pseudo-review at the end written by Nabokov. He sometimes published under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin" in the 1920s to 1940s, to mask his identity from critics. And he made cameo appearances in some of his novels, such as the character "Vivian Darkbloom" (an anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov"), who appears in both Lolita and Ada, or Ardor. I found this really funny, it's from the pseudo-review -
In fact, Nabokov has gone a step further and under the mask of Sirin has projected a tertiary persona called Vasili Shishkov. This action was the outcome of a ten-year-old feud he had been carrying with the most gifted of the migr critics, George Adamovich, who had rejected at first, then reluctantly accepted and finally admired with many an enthusiastic flourish Sirin's prose, but still kept pooh-poohing his verse. With the sporting co-operation of a review's editor, Nabokov-Sirin assumed the name of Shishkov. On an August day in 1939 Adamovich, reviewing in the Russian- language newspaper Posledni ja Novosti (published in Paris) the 69th issue of the quarterly Sovremennyja Zapiski (also published in Paris), lavished inordinate praise on Shishkov's poem The Poets and suggested that at this late date the Russian emigration might have at last produced a great poet.
In the fall of the same year, in the same newspaper, Sirin described at length an imaginary interview he had had with "Vasili Shishkov". In a groggy but still game reply Adamovich said that he doubted it was a hoax but added that Sirin might be inventive enough to enact inspiration and genius that would greatly surpass his, Sirin's, capacities.
Particularly nice things about butterflies -
And the next moment I was among them. Over the small shrubs of bog bilberry with fruit of a dim, dreamy blue, over the brown eye of stagnant water, over moss and mire, over the flower spikes of the fragrant bog orchid (the nochnaya fialka of Russian poets), a dusky little Fritillary bearing the name of a Norse goddess passed in low, skimming flight. Pretty Cordigera, a gemlike moth, buzzed all over its uliginose food plant. I pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, gray-marbled Satyrs. Unmindful of the mosquitoes that furred my forearms, I stooped with a grunt of delight to snuff out the life of some silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing in the folds of my net. Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species- vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes about timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
x
I just finished reading Speak, Memory which is the autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov. It was very interesting and there were many moving and delightful moments. There is also a really amusing pseudo-review at the end written by Nabokov. He sometimes published under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin" in the 1920s to 1940s, to mask his identity from critics. And he made cameo appearances in some of his novels, such as the character "Vivian Darkbloom" (an anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov"), who appears in both Lolita and Ada, or Ardor. I found this really funny, it's from the pseudo-review -
In fact, Nabokov has gone a step further and under the mask of Sirin has projected a tertiary persona called Vasili Shishkov. This action was the outcome of a ten-year-old feud he had been carrying with the most gifted of the migr critics, George Adamovich, who had rejected at first, then reluctantly accepted and finally admired with many an enthusiastic flourish Sirin's prose, but still kept pooh-poohing his verse. With the sporting co-operation of a review's editor, Nabokov-Sirin assumed the name of Shishkov. On an August day in 1939 Adamovich, reviewing in the Russian- language newspaper Posledni ja Novosti (published in Paris) the 69th issue of the quarterly Sovremennyja Zapiski (also published in Paris), lavished inordinate praise on Shishkov's poem The Poets and suggested that at this late date the Russian emigration might have at last produced a great poet.
In the fall of the same year, in the same newspaper, Sirin described at length an imaginary interview he had had with "Vasili Shishkov". In a groggy but still game reply Adamovich said that he doubted it was a hoax but added that Sirin might be inventive enough to enact inspiration and genius that would greatly surpass his, Sirin's, capacities.
Particularly nice things about butterflies -
And the next moment I was among them. Over the small shrubs of bog bilberry with fruit of a dim, dreamy blue, over the brown eye of stagnant water, over moss and mire, over the flower spikes of the fragrant bog orchid (the nochnaya fialka of Russian poets), a dusky little Fritillary bearing the name of a Norse goddess passed in low, skimming flight. Pretty Cordigera, a gemlike moth, buzzed all over its uliginose food plant. I pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, gray-marbled Satyrs. Unmindful of the mosquitoes that furred my forearms, I stooped with a grunt of delight to snuff out the life of some silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing in the folds of my net. Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species- vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes about timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
x
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Spring --> Chalet :
Nemesis, Joel, AnnaLee, pastries and poetry in the woods