annalee

It was colder today but I wrapped up warm and the air was that beautiful fresh kind of cold. Everything is blossoming and growing. I saw goldfinches and a song thrush in the kirk yard. Then in the afternoon I went to see lo sono l'amore (I am love) at the cinema. I really love going to the cinema alone (doing most things alone in fact). I can't remember when I was last so overwhelmed by a film. You really must try and see it, especially while it's still on at the cinema because the cinematography is so immaculately beautiful. It's one of those films that is so absorbing that you wonder how you can go into the outside world again when it finishes. I actually didn't like Swinton before but she speaks Italian and Russian in this film and she's transformed... at least I think it's because of the change in language but maybe it's simiply good direction and being in a good film.

One of my favorite moments is when Emma is falling in love but through the food that Antonio is cooking for her so everything else is in darkness except her because the food tastes so beautiful that it illuminates her! I think if I ever could fall in love it could be with someone who made wonderful food. The soundtrack is really excellent too, it's John Adams and it makes a perfect atmosphere, so intense. A lot of the film was set in Milano and there is a scene where Emma is on the roof of the Duomo Cathedral. It made me remember my trip to Milano a couple of years ago. That was the first time I had travelled anywhere alone and I remember spending about two hours up there in the heat and just being in awe of the beautiful sculpture and architecture. When I saw the trailer for I am love I thought that it looked like pure Visconti and then it turned out that the theme of the film is actually very like Visconti's Il gattopardo which I adored. It made me think back to the novel.

I remember writing a journal a while ago about Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa and his masterpiece The Leopard, how I love that book. The only other things he wrote were some fragments of biography, a small number of short stories and an unfinished novel. Apparently he planned to write for 20 years and finally he did but only for a short time as he would soon become ill and die with just that small collection of works, none of which were published in his lifetime so he never knew how appreciated his singular masterpiece The Leopard was. I just started reading his remaining collected writings, just a small book about the same size as The Leopard, in it I loved his short story The Siren and the biographic fragments which are very much sketches for the novel I think. His life was not terribly short but still not long enough I'm sure. His writing career was very short but it's truly amazing what he produced in that time. Everyone seems to feel a lot of pressure about when they should do or achieve certain things but maybe it doesn't matter as long as you do it sometime when the time is right.

When one reaches the decline of life it is imperative to try and gather together as many as possible of the sensations which have passed through our particular organism. Few can succeed in thus creating a masterpiece (Rousseau, Stendahl, Proust) but all should find it possible to preserve in some such way things which without this slight effort would be lost for ever. To keep a diary, or write down one's own memories at a certain age, should be a duty "State-imposed"; material thus accumulated would have inestimable value after three or four generations; many of the psychological and historical problems that assail humanity would be resolved. There are no memoirs, even those written by insignificant people, which do not include social and graphic details of first-rate importance.

The extraordinary interest that Defoe's novels aroused is due to the fact that they are near-diaries, brilliant though apocryphal. What, one wonders, would genuine ones have been like? Imagine, say, the diary of a Parisian procuress of the Rgence, of the memories of Byron's valet during the Ventian period!

I think it's like magic to think of all the past memories and experiences of the vast number of humans who have spent their lives on this earth but it also makes me sad a lot too.

I loved the way he ended his introduction, with no intention for anything he wrote to ever be read and no worry about that either.

So the reader (who won't exist) must expect to be led meandering through a lost Earthly Paradise. If it bores him, I don't mind.