*** Accent, language, time and place, community practice (peacemaking), learning, insight into culture, style (dialogue, rants) *** If one lives in Galloway, on either fishes or paints. *** the man who leads a curious contemplative life *** There are large and stately studios . . . *** There are workaday studios . . . *** artists who live hermit-like and do their own charring . . . *** This one thing they have in common, that they take their work seriously and have no time for amateurs. *** He had been weighed in the balance over many seasons and pronounced harmless . . . *** Campbell pointed out that all the administrative posts in London were held by Scotsmen . . . *** Don’t be a fool. That fellow’s drunk. *** The manners of him are past all bearing. *** Our little artists’ community has always gotten on well together . . . *** He’s no a Scotsman at a’ for everybody knows he’s fra’ Glasgow, and his mother was an Ulsterwoman by the name of Flanagan. *** Wimsey steered him home to his lodgings prattling cheerfully, and tucked him into bed. *** He actually said it at the Arts Club in Edinburgh, before a whole lot of people, friends of Gowan’s. *** Oh, he can paint – after a fashion. *** He’s what Gowan calls him – a commercial traveller. *** Well, cheerio, then, and sweet dreams, said Wimsey. *** He pretended to say nothing, and all the time he was spreading rumours and scandal. *** No wonder Farren’s landscapes looked as it they were painted with an axe . . . *** asides (omnipotent narrator), lists, show not tell, simile *** He would not repair Ferguson’s wall. *** They found the body at 2 o’clock up on the hills by Newton-Stewart. *** then the lodge and the long avenue of rhododendrons *** A man who might have been a crofter, greeted Wimsey with a kind of cautious excitement. *** On the easel was a painting, half, or more than half finished, still wet and shining. *** The doctor watched him with grave approval. *** It was ever so a striking piece of work, bold in its masses and chiaroscuro, and strongly laid on with a knife. *** Wimsey removed the cap and diagnosed it as crimson lake. *** Reconstructing the accident, my lord? *** What would you be looking for? he demanded reasonably. *** (Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the sergeant what he was looking for and why but as the intelligent reader will read, supply those details himself, they are omitted from this page). *** Don’t you believe it laddie, said Wimsey. *** Murdered? said the sergeant. *** It’s a lonely spot here. A man might easily commit a dozen murders, if he chose his time well. *** The murderer’s got to be an artist, and a clever one, for that painting would have to pass muster as Campbell’s work. *** At the end of this stood two little detached cottages, side by side, looking over a deep pool . . . *** A glass-roofed studio had been built out beyond the kitchen . . . *** When the artist is away the charwoman will always play among the paint-pots . . . *** He found Mrs. Strachan seated by the window instructing her small daughter Myra in the art of plain knitting. *** Strachan had an abrupt manner which tended to make people nervous, and Wimsey more than suspected him of being a bit of a domestic tyrant. *** They’ll all have went tae the exhibition. *** Ferguson too, was Scottish in accent, though not in idiom. *** People who commit murders must take a few risks. *** All of these people were highly respected citizens. *** A little tactful gossip, Sir Maxwell, by a cheerful, friendly inquisitive bloke like myself, may do wonders in a crisis. *** I told you I didn’t. *** This time Mrs. Farren had really fainted. *** Nobody could expect a girl to hold her tongue over so fine a piece of gossip . . . *** Wimsey said goodbye to Jeanie, with a caution against talking too much about her employer’s affairs . . . *** Vermillion, Naples yellow, ultramarine – sophisticated naivete, and no cast shadows. *** Wimsey laughed. *** I’ve got a new limerick for you. *** She was making bannocks when Wimsey arrived. *** Well, cheerio, then, said the chauffeur. *** Really, the sky is quite a poem. *** the sudden opening of the blue gate *** But, perhaps I better spill the beans to you . . . *** She’s married to an engineer in Edinburgh. *** No two men paint at the same rate. *** A shock was being prepared for sergeant Dalziel. *** Unhappily, the Scottish peasant has a remarkable talent for silence when he likes . . . *** Life’s just one damn thing after another. *** There was a kind of stolid dignity about George which suggested that he disliked being flurried. *** The picnic was a cheerful one. ***
Sarton, May. The House by the Sea: A Journal. 1981.
993 words
*** When I moved to this house by the sea in May of ’73 I had in mind to keep a journal . . . For months the sea was such a tranquilizer that sometimes I wondered whether I had made a fatal mistake and would never be able to write again. *** Such major decisions are made on instinct rather than reason, and in them chance plays a part . . . had died . . . friendships born of that place ‘ ‘ ‘ the most imperative reason was that I had been through a traumatic personal experience there . . . the house itself felt contaminated by pain. *** Nevertheless I may have stayed on had it not been for an extraordinary act of chance, and an act of extraordinary friendship that made major change as easy as opening a door. *** Later in the day I told them about my depression . . . Why don’t you come and live there, rent it from us, and settle in? *** empty rooms, so large and full of light, was where to find the shelter I need for my work … a room . . . small windows looking down on a grassy path to the sea on one side and into the treetops on the other . . . tree peonies and azaleas . . . *** Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me . . . *** I have not been able to listen to music . . . *** part of the spell would be the influence of the tides . . . *** I bathed in the gentleness of this field-landscape. *** pots of freesia and daffodils *** In the years at Wild Knoll my life has expanded rather than narrowed . . . this house is larger . . . my life inside it has changed. *** I find myself nourished by the visits of many friends, friends of the work who have written me for years . . . old friends that are passing by . . . *** I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial . . . But the real continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone . . . I would have nothing to give . . . *** Two days ago I felt marvellously free . . . *** At dawn a heavy frost on the grass, a congregation of crows cawing in the woods behind the house . . . *** If there is an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication yet at the same time a very personal record, it may be in what E. Bowen said: “One must regard oneself impersonally as an instrument.” *** A pale blue sea drifting off into the dusk. *** A letter like this makes the day flower. *** It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to another Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely. *** I speak of mother’s making me such exquisite clothes for my dolls . . . *** I guess one of my best Christmas presents was the rhyme on the card . . . sense of belonging . . . *** I suppose I am angry because he offends the artist in me at every turn, and dismays the human being in me. *** I haven’t yet formulated a way of handling three enterprises at one – this journal, the book of portraits of which Bowen is the first, and poems. *** Here on the third floor I look about me and feel extremely happy. *** Without anxiety life would have very little savor. *** The saint must not know he is a saint . . . he is far too busy thinking about other people. *** She is a flame, and that flame warms and lights everything around her. *** In solitude one can achieve a good relationship with oneself. *** Most people swallow the unacceptable because it makes life so much easier. At what point does one feel that doing battle, however painful and rending, is necessary? *** It is not a matter of being a recluse . . . I shall never be that; I enjoy and need my friends too much. *** I don’t think one should be without hope, though, said miss Ullman . . . *** Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they’ve got to get hold of someone to prove they’re worthwhile . . . If they decide to be alone . . . Society will pity them, look down on them.*** There is a new confidence about being a woman . . . a new and valuable communion between women. I sense that we now want to help each other. *** After my nap we went for a walk about the place. *** I understood why old men plant trees. *** A marvelous day here . . . and now the most perfect Fra Angelico blue sea, no wind, the sunset just touching the end of the field. Perfectly still except for the cry of a jay far off. *** The effect of the barrage of bad news seems to be to create more and more indifference and apathy. This business of violence can only be handled by me by examining and dealing with it through poetry. *** describe our existence in relation to God as one of waiting . . . A religion in which this is forgotten . . . replaces God by its own creation of an image of God . . . *** I found a rose bush with the mail. *** We had a hot discussion about aggression in men and women. *** I heard on Saturday that I am about to get a third honorary degree . . . ***
“Sometimes, during those first weeks, I would wake suddenly in the middle of the night and for a moment, in the darkness, feel a disorientation so complete that I might never have known what a world was, or a bed or a chair.”
“My mother says your father should put her in an orphanage.”
“She cracked a hand hard against the baby’s cheek.”
“Have you gone crazy?”
“Once when we were hoeing beans in the front field someone came to visit us…”
“And if he loses he gives you the farm.”
“They’d offer me fruit from their lunchboxes sometimes, or pieces of strong white cheese, trying to joke with me in their strange speech.”
“Maybe I’ll have to take care of her.”
“With my aunt’s arrival things began to change…”
“Everything she did for the baby seemed flawed somehow.”
“I waited in the October cold when I seemed to belong to no one…”
“But I couldn’t do these things, didn’t have the right feeling inside to do them…”
“The church seemed the one place where my language wasn’t held against me…”
“If I’d been more intelligent, more myself somehow…”
“I took a special pleasure in making these stories my own…”
“Yet in him as well I sensed no centre finally, no way of pinning down what was true in him.”
“In all of this I was left with nothing, no reward for trying to follow out what seemed the careful, ruthless logic of fitting in.”
“Now and then some boy I’d known back in Italy would catch my eye with a newcomers furtive hopefulness…”
“But I didn’t know how to answer him.”
“In the next weeks we went through a kind of penance for what had happened…”
“Aunt Teresa would stand at the kitchen window sometimes now with her face so emptied it hurt me to look at her…”
“In the mornings I’d wake her when I got up for school, but beyond that she was on her own, seeming to have fashioned for herself a small quiet life with its own child’s logic and order…”
“At the counter he winked at me . . . For an instant he was no longer simply the Jew who sold clothes but a man who might have some other secret life…”
“Hated that meanness in me but knew with stubborn sureness of childhood that Rita was the only thing that truly belonged to me.”
“Ignoring me then as if to make the point that she had something of her own now, didn’t need me… “
“I returned from school to find her playing with a collie on the front lawn, a ghostly double of Lassie like a gift a fairy had brought.”
“Are you okay?”
“I took Rita to a matinee to try to break the spell of her bereavement…”
“From this darkness, Rita and I set out for school every day like fugitives…”
“And she managed to stave him off for the moment, setting his guilt before his rage like a wall.”
“I saw them linger sometimes half the lunch hour with him, always in half-retreat and yet held there by his teasing badgering, resented this power they allowed Johnny over them, the ammunition they gave him to hurt me.”
“Something in his eyes then, suddenly bared like that in their startling blue, gave me the sense that he was about to betray me in some way.”
“There was a careful protocol now around our dressing and undressing, a charged, unspoken avoidance: we seemed to see ourselves now as others might, to have the sense of some audience gauging our normalcy.”
“There seemed no place inside me to speak from, no word in me that was true.”
“But the rain will just wash it away,”…
“I bowed my head, trying to feign emotion, afraid of betraying my lack of it.”
“I dreamt of her once in a field, simply there at a distance.”
“My first response was only a resistance to their intrusion, at having to work now to present some acceptable version of myself.”
“It struck me how wilful and hard-won religion seemed in these meetings, how transforming, wasn’t merely a given as it has always been in my life, pervasive and unquestioned as air – I felt something truthful in this, defiant, the group of us seeming hidden away in our upstairs classroom like early Christians in the catacombs.”
“I felt I’d missed something, some crucial instant in the evening’s comfortable sobriety that had given rise to this outpouring of sudden faith.”
“What I most wished for finally was not the transcendence of belief but simply to feel at home in this strangeness, this ordinariness.”
“My mother said to ask if you wanted to come for lunch.”
“Yet in the end something seemed always held back, a question never posed, an unease never quite broken through; and sometimes the meals lapsed into a strange, deflated silence…”
“Yet some line seemed to have been drawn now that I had to fall on one side of or the other.”
“I was surprised how much her laughter cut me, how much I’d invested in the possibility that she might like me.”
“I awoke the next day with the sake hollowness in me, what had happened eclipsing my thoughts haemorrhage at the centre of them.”
“It had taken so little to strip away her mistaken impression of me…”
“Still brightening then at the sight of me, waving and shouting out as I passed as if nothing unkind had ever happened between us.”
“I felt a kind of awe at my sudden freedom.”
“The others had begun to talk.”
“I’d seen once where a man fell asleep on the train and awoke to find it had stopped at a town in the past.”
“Even speaking Italian seemed to require a hopeless exertion, my mouth resisting it like a lie.”
“I lay spread-eagled in the snow, staring up into the star-spattered dark of the sky.”
Remarque, Erich Maria. Trans. A.W. Wheen. All Quiet on the Western Front. 1928.
979 words
*** We are at rest five miles behind the front.*** Now our bellies are full of beef and haricot beans. *** I have exchanged my chewing tobacco with Katczinsky for his cigarettes . . . *** It is true we have no right to the windfall . . . a miscalculation to think of it. *** Fourteen days ago we had to go up and relive the front line. *** It was noon before the first of us crawled out of our quarters. *** Muller, who still carries his school textbooks with him . . . *** Close behind us were our friends . . . *** He sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper . . . *** Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten . . . *** Yes, we did have heavy losses yesterday . . . *** Of his own free will he issues in addition half a pound of synthetic honey to each man. *** The mail has come, almost every man has a few letters and papers. *** I will remember how embarrassed we were as recruits in barracks when we had to use the general latrine. *** These are wonderfully carefree hours . . . around us stretches the flowery meadow. The notes of our accordion float across the billets. *** Kantorek had been our schoolmaster, a stern little man in a grey tail-coat . . . It is very queer that the unhappiness of men is often brought about by small men. *** At that time, even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward’; no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for . . . *** We left him for dead. We couldn’t bring him with us because we had to come back helter-skelter . . . *** Naturally we could not blame Kantorek for this. Where would the world be if one brought every man to book? *** While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards – they were free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they . . . we saw that thre was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through. *** But how can a man look after anyone in the field! *** How can one calm him without making him suspicious? *** He refuses. If we were to give morphia to everyone we would have to have tubs full . . . *** Yes, that’s the way they think, a thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk. *** It is strange to think that at home, in the drawer . . . lies a bundle of poems . . . Our early life is cut off . . . vague . . . *** All the older men were linked up with their previous life. They have wives, children, occupations . . . at our age the influence of parents is at its weakest and girls have not yet got hold of us. *** Our thoughts of career and occupation were as yet too impractical in character to furnish any scheme of life . . . we recognized that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush . . . *** We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-performers. *** At bayonet-practice I had constantly to fight with Himmelstoss, I with a heavy weapon, whilst he had a handy wooden one with which he easily struck my arms till they were black and blue . . . I became a past master in the parallel bars. *** He always referred to us as swine, but there was nevertheless, a certain respect in his tone. *** We became hard. *** Then he says, you can take my lace-up boots with you Muller. We grew up together and that always makes it a bit different. I have copied his essays. *** If you find my watch, send it home . . . *** We indulge in reminiscences. *** As sure as they get a stripe or a star, they become different men. *** We sing dispiritedly for it is all we can do to trudge along with our rifles. *** It is a warm evening and the twilight seems like a canopy under whose shelter we felt drawn together. *** The gun-emplacements are camouflaged with bushes against aerial observation and look like a kind of military ‘Feast of Tabernacles’. *** To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. *** By the animal instinct that is awakened is us we are led and protected. *** We’re in for it. *** Cries are heard between explosions. *** The men cannot overtake the wounded beasts which fly in their pain . . . *** Darkness darker than the night rushes on us with giant strides . . . *** I grab for my gas mask. *** The graveyard is a mass of wreckage. Coffins and corpses lie strewn about. They have been killed once again; but each one that was flung up saved one of us. *** He is worried his wife has to look after the farm. *** Albert expresses it, the war has ruined us for everything. *** We don’t talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have. *** The girl in the poster is a wonder to us. *** My mother is the only one who does not ask questions. ***
My name is Asher Lev, the Asher Lev. *** Yes, of course, observant Jews do not paint crucifixions. In fact observant Jews do not paint at all in the way I am painting. *** The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth . . . so it is time for the defense. But I will not apologize for a mystery. *** unique and disquieting gift *** Black death 1347 *** half of population of Europe destroyed *** a carousing Russian nobleman . . . *** My father’s great-great-grandfather had transformed those estates into a source of immense wealth for his employer as well as himself . . . began to travel . . . to do good deeds and bring the Master of the Universe into the world . . . That great man would come to me in my dreams and echo my father’s queries about the latest bare wall I had decorated and the sacred margins . . . My father’s father, whose name I bear, was a scholar and a recluse . . . *** My mother came from a family of leading Sadeger Hasidim, pious Jews . . . Asher Lev, born in 1943, Brooklyn . . . the junction point of two significant family lines . . . *** I can remember at the age of four . . . holding my pencil . . . transferring the world around me in pieces of paper, margins of books, bare expanses of walls. *** The married women of our group concealed their natural hair beneath wigs for reasons of modesty. *** I grew up encrusted with lead and spectrumed with crayons. I remember the first drawing of my mother’s face . . . She listened to me recite the Krias Shema . . . They were happy years. *** In the very early years, before my mother became ill, my father travelled a great deal . . . “The Rebbe asked me to go” *** My slight features and thinness or build I inherited from my mother. *** My father would kiss me, take his black leather bag and his attache case, and leave. *** I drew him often in those very early years . . . walking together to our synagogue . . . I drew him as he prayed at home in his prayer shawl and teffelin. I asked him once, Papa, how can a man who kills one person be like one who kills a whole world?” *** Because he also kills all the children and children’s children who might have come from that person. *** Why do you study so often Papa? *** He said to me once, gazing at one of my drawings, “you have nothing better to do with your time, Asher? Your grandfather would not have liked you to waste so much time with foolishness.” *** “A drawing is not foolishness Papa.” He looked at my in surprise but said nothing. *** I drew my memory of my father singing his father’s melody. *** He sang it again the week my mother was taken to the hospital. *** “You should make the world pretty, Asher,” my mother said. ” *** The nest was pale yellow, the birds were orange and deep blue, and there were green leaves and red flowers everywhere. *** I found myself in front of a drawing filled with black and red swirls and gray eyes and dead birds. *** People knew I was Aryeh Lev’s son. They patted me on the head, pinched my cheek, smiled, nodded indulgently at my drawings . . . *** I took my pad and crayons with me every day . . . *** “A little Chagall,” my uncle said. *** “I want to buy one of your drawings” . . . I did not understand what he was saying. I looked at my father. His face was dark. They went out of the room. *** Green birds appeared on trees. *** There was the drawing of the Russian Jew, barely visible on my desk. *** That September I entered Ladover yeshiva . . . I stopped drawing. *** “Dear children the enemies of the Jewish people have again shown us how much they hate us and our Torah.” *** He prayed without swaying back and forth . . . But why Vienna, Papa? *** Something has happened to my mind, my heart . . . *** I drew a book burning . . . *** “I know about Jesus,” I said, “Jesus is the God of the goyim. *** Didn’t I know that such drawings were vile . . . *** He said very little to me during the two days of the festival. *** I chose two subjects, the two that I knew concerned him most: Talmud and Bible. *** My name is Jacob Kahn, he said. My name is Asher Lev, I said. *** Do you have any idea what you are getting yourself into? No. I know your father, he will become my enemy. *** I believe it is man’s task to make life holy. *** As an artist are you responsible to Jews? He seemed angry. *** I had a responsibility to my parents . . . *** I put my brushes down. *** The Rebbe sat quietly behind the bare desk. *** The gallery was crowded. *** We drove to Boston to see a Cubist exhibit. *** I painted. I attended college and studied Russian. *** Become a great artist. That is the only way to justify what you are doing to everyone’s life. *** Those hours by that window in the evenings were of a loveliness I have never again felt in my life . . . *** The old studio of Picasso . . . *** Crucifixion. ***
ShellseekerReflections 