Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out."

--Heraclitus

In the opening epigram, facing the Table of Contents page, Heraclitus, over 2,500 years ago, said in twenty words what Annie Dillard used 279 pages to say in her masterpiece of nature writing, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Using keen observation and much research, her chronicle of a year of life near Tinker Creek and its surrounds is a much more nuanced and detailed look at the Fire that keeps each of us and the rest of the Universe in constant aliveness and motion.

A 2016 Reading Challenge book, I finished my well-worn ex-library copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek last night, and have some thoughts about it before moving on to the next book on my list. This book reminds me of a project begun in 2013 by my favorite book blogger who blogs as dovegreyreader. She had been reading nature writers Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin and decided to learn as much as she could about the area covering a one mile radius surrounding her English country home. She has written about her explorations here: Beating the Bounds.

From the frontispiece of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance...I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

"It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen..." From the beginning, Dillard is "beating the bounds" of her neighborhood in western Virginia while using what she sees and hears as evidence for her personal abiding faith in a Creator. We are with her as she walks along Tinker Creek and then stands stock still as she watches a frog collapse inward, like a leather purse being slowly folded flat. She then reports what she found through research that an aquatic water bug with pincers holds the frog in place from behind, injects a liquefying agent, and quickly sucks the frog to death. Poor innocent frog! But wait, does not the frog eat something else alive one second and dead the next? As Alfred Lord Tennyson said in a poem, nature is "red in tooth and claw" and that is quite apparent from the start in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Organized by season, Dillard takes us around her suburban surrounds. From the sky to the quarry we learn how to "see" nature. Once seen, we learn a little more about how to understand what we are seeing. And, for some of us this understanding is a spiritual experience, for others a confirmation that physics and biology work together in mysterious ways.

For Dillard, the journey's ultimate goal is spiritual. For me, reading about the journey resulted in a better understanding of what is over my head, in the water around me, and under my feet. Satisfying enough for this reader. The ongoing confirmation of Dillard's faith actually seemed "preachy" at times and nearly caused me to put the book down and not finish it. However, reminding myself that not everybody is the same (thank you, Jane Austen!), I stuck with it and am glad I did.

For me, the most incredible bit in the book takes place in a quarry, in the fall. Dillard has decided to contemplate the sunset as she looks over a quarry. She notices a curved "something" on a rock ledge over the way. Deciding to take a look, she walks in that direction but stops as soon as she realizes it is a small copperhead snake resting on the rock, still warm from the last of the day's sunlight. Knowing the risk she is taking, she moves closer to the snake and sits down within four feet of it. She sits very still and observes the snake, its scales, how its tail decreases in size to nothingness, how its head is raised up above the rock. Then, in amazement she watches a mosquito land on the snake's back and begin sucking its blood. This lasts for about two minutes. She imagines how much effort the mosquito has to expend to reach between the scales and find the perfect place to insert its needle-sharp snout. After this is over, Dillard wonders if the snake could feel the mosquito as it went about its work. She also tells the reader that copperhead snakes are abundant in her area, account for most poisonous snakebites in the U.S., and are not quite poisonous enough to kill an adult human. There are timber rattlers in her woods too and she always carries a snake bite kit with her wherever she goes.

I admire her courage. Copperheads are found in the hill country of Texas too. When we visited relatives there I was always worried sick about one finding my kids as they played in the brushy areas around their grandma's house. We should have thought of a snake bite kit!

Here are a few of the notes I took as I went along:

Dillard quotes Arthur Koestler: "Gravity, to Copernicus, is the nostalgia of things to become spheres."

From a physicist: "Everything that has happened is a particle, everything in the future is a wave."

Dillard: "Beauty itself is the language for which there is no key."
"I find it hard to see anything about a bird that it does not want seen. It demands my full attention."

This is a GOOD book. If you are interested in nature and like nature writing, even down to the gory bits, I highly recommend it.

Annie Dillard is now in her early 70s and lives on an island in the Puget Sound. Here is what she has to say about her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

"In 1971 I wanted to try my hand at prose. My journals were full of facts that I used to write Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), a sustained nonfiction narrative about the fields, creeks, woods, and mountains near Roanoke, Virginia. Because I "Named" its chapters, in the style of 19th-century narratives, many reviewers took it for a book of essays. The book attempted to describe the creator, if any, by studying creation, leading one writer to call me (wonderfully) 'one of the foremost horror writers of the 20th century' ".

It's that "nature, red in tooth and claw" bit.

The Sea, The Sea and The Sea

The sea. My favorite, most favorite place is the seacoast. I love how the sea changes. I love the smell of the sea air and the feel of the biting wind. I can never get enough of sea gazing.

A friend is traveling to Ireland later this year. She is reading Irish writers for the culture, history, geography, and to take the pulse of the country. She mentioned that she was reading The Sea by John Banville. At the time of our conversation I was reading one of my 2016 Reading Challenge TBR books, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. Both Irish writers, both winners of the Booker Prize for these books. I had read Banville's book several years ago but hardly remembered it. We agreed that we would get together soon to talk about our respective books. I decided to re-read The Sea and have just finished it.

The books are quite different, but also eerily the same. Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea is a chunk at 495 pages. Banville's is a quick read at 195 pages. I say "quick read" with tongue firmly in cheek. He packs a lot into one sentence. Both books are about memory and its vagaries. The protagonists are both men approaching old age. The setting of both is by the sea and the sea is a main "character" in each.

In The Sea, The Sea Charles Arrowby, recently retired from the theatre, has moved to an isolated house somewhere in coastal north England. His property includes an old Martello Tower, a remnant of the Napoleonic Wars. The house has no electricity or central heat. He is a lifelong bachelor who cooks hideous meals from canned goods, and he hints at a grand romantic disappointment in his early years. Charles intends to write his memoirs, but the book is barely begun before he is frantically writing about current events, of his own making, as they spiral out of control.

Here is Charles' proud description of one of his meals:

"Spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil; spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill; boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soy oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in; with these a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef; a bottle of retsina."

Sounds good, eh?

Charles is self-regarding, manipulative, jealous, obsessive, treats people very badly, and thinks his house might be haunted. He has delusional visions which he ascribes to possible LSD flashbacks. He swims in the sea daily and is eventually visited by many of the old acquaintances he is meant to write about in his memoirs. Due to an obsession about his lost love, he commits a crime and finds himself in the middle of a horrible mess.

I could not put this book down. Murdoch's writing compels the reader to find out what crazy thing Charles or one of his visitors is going to say or do next. But it is not only Charles who is a main character. The sea, the sea is ever present. Murdoch's descriptions (written by Charles) of the sea are simply breathtaking. Rather than describing the sea in relation to someone or something happening at the time, it stands alone as its own separate entity, never just background for the action.

"There was nothing upon the luminous faintly-wrinkled expanse except wavery yellow replicas of the evening star and the low crouching moon. The sky was still a dimmed glowing blue, not yet sunk into the blackish blue of night."

"The sea was a choppy dark blue, the sky pale, with a smooth gleaming buff-coloured cloud just above the horizon like a long tatter of silk."

"Cool summer weather had come back with a misty sky and a calm sea. The water was a very pale luminous grey-blue almost white the same colour as the sky, shifting with a quick small dancing movement, and scattered by the misted sun with little explosions of metallic pale-gold light. It had the look of a happy sea..."

"The sea had regained its bejewelled purplish look, inlaid with spotted lines of emerald."

Sounds idyllic doesn't it, this deadly, beautiful sea?

Murdoch is known to be a difficult writer to "get". I have read several other works by her, and found them to be a bit inaccessible. Not so with The Sea, The Sea. She was a moral philosopher and this comes through in her writing.

"Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted."

Agree or disagree? Worth pondering. Personally, I think we are all actors most of the time.

Without giving away spoilers, I will leave it at that. Charles lands on his feet but is left with the prospect of aging:

"That is a dreadful land, old age."

I could not help thinking of Iris Murdoch's own "dreadful land" as she slowly succumbed to Alzheimer's disease.

 Moving on to John Banville's The Sea. What a treat! I am so glad I decided to re-read this book. I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Banville either unconsciously put in bits he gleaned from The Sea, The Sea or he was paying homage to Iris Murdoch. She won the Booker in 1978, Banville in 2005.

Both books include the word "plimsoll", a type of rubber-soled canvas slip-on leisure or sports shoe. The usage of this word is not very common nowadays so it seemed funny to me that both Murdoch and Banville would choose it to describe a pair of shoes.

In The Sea, The Sea Charles visits a churchyard cemetery. He finds a headstone with no name, just the word "Dummy" on it. Apparently a deaf-mute sailor from the 1800s is buried there. In The Sea Banville has given the nickname "Dummy" to one of the characters, a young boy who is mute and also has webbed toes.

As I said earlier, both characters are late middle-aged men, both remembering their lives, and dealing with those memories in their own way.

After his wife dies of cancer, Max, an art historian, moves to a lodging house called Cedars to grieve. The house is located on the seacoast. Max has been there before. As a young adolescent he stayed nearby with his parents in a lower-class beach shack for a few weeks each summer. Cedars (the entire house) was being rented by an upper class family called Grace. Max was befriended by the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, who were about his age. He was swept into the family life of the Graces and referred to them as "the gods" because of their carefree, grand style of life.

Max worshipped Mrs. Grace. He watched her, relaxing on the beach:

"She lifts a hand up high to brush a clinging strand of hair from her damp forehead and I fix on the secret shadow under her armpit, plum-blue, the tint of my humid fantasies for nights to come."

Max is a complex character. He is from the lower classes but he marries the only child of a well-to-do businessman so he moves up in society. He had aspired to move up after his summer with "the gods" but has always thought of himself as a fraud in that world. He has had a career as an art historian and is supposed to be writing a book on the French artist Bonnard, but it is languishing, and Max thinks of himself as a dilettante. His daughter Claire has given up the pursuit of an art history degree for social work and Max is determined to steer her back on course because he expects his daughter to be a serious scholar, not half serious as he considers himself to be. Max shows us glimpses of his cruel side. As a boy, he used to beat his little dog so he could enjoy how it came cowering back to him for love and affection in spite of the beating. He bullied a village boy in the presence of one of the Grace twins so as to appear "better" than the low class boy. Max's version of events in the book make him seem like a good person, but memory is unreliable and the cruelty in some of his actions and his sudden anger at his dead wife belie his belief in his own goodness.

The Sea bounces back and forth between the present and the past. Max recalls his wife's last year as she is dying. He remembers that long ago summer when he was first introduced to death but it is not until the end that we find out how. As with Murdoch, the sea is also ever present in The Sea. However, not as a character, but more as a setting for the action. The writing is, like Murdoch's beautiful:

"...air like scratched glass..."

"...last spikes of sunlight..."

"...the water racing in over the flats, swift and shiny as mercury, stopping at nothing..."

"A breeze smacked down on the beach and swarmed across it slantwise under a skim of dry sand then came on over the water, chopping the surface into sharp little metallic shards. I shivered not from the cold now but as if something had passed through me, silent swift, irresistible."

"The mud shone blue as a new bruise..."

Overall, The Sea is, as reviewed by the NY Times, "about grief, the misery and confusion the narrator feels on losing his wife." It is also about memory and how we view the past through a small lens, in bits and pieces, usually static, and not necessarily as events actually unfolded.

Finally, from another reviewer:

"...Banville's prose is sublime. Several times on every page the reader is arrested by a line or sentence that demands to be read again. They are like hits of some delicious drug, these sentences. One has to stop for a while, and gaze smiling and unseeing into the middle distance, before returning to the page for one's next fix. For a shortish book, it takes a long time to read."

As I said, Banville packs a lot into one sentence.

I can highly recommend both of these books. Not light reads, either one, but good reading to take with you if you are planning a long visit to the seacoast. Just the descriptions of the sea are enough to keep one gazing out over the water for hours and hours.

Spotify and Desert Island Discs

Do you listen to music while reading? I do. Sometimes because I find it easier to concentrate without random noise, or because I am in the same room where television is on and cannot read otherwise. My favorite way to listen is Spotify. I subscribe to the ad-free premium version.

I first heard of Spotify when listening to the podcast Books on the Nightstand. Ann Kingman, one of the pair of publisher reps who created the podcast, was talking about listening to music while reading. She said she uses Spotify to find music to suit the mood of the book she is reading. This idea intrigued me, so I went looking for Spotify.

Now, several years later, I have many playlists that reflect my taste in music and I go to for enjoyment, background, or to set the mood for reading a particular book or author.

While reading Virginia Woolf, I play my "Woolf" playlist which includes Wagner, Beethoven, and Mozart (so far). I built this playlist from mentions of London concerts attended by the Woolfs in Virginia's diary.

Rainier Maria Rilke came from an old Bohemian aristocratic family. His letters and poems are accompanied by music from "old Bohemia", now part of the Czech Republic. I have downloaded Czech and Slovak folk music for my "Rilke" playlist.

A fun way to learn about an author's taste in music is to listen to BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. I love this podcast! There is a treasure trove of programs in the archives on the website. I am a big fan of Ian McEwan. He was interviewed on Desert Island Discs and his favorite music includes jazz, Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Donizetti, and Van Morrison. If I am reading one of his books, I might create a "McEwan" playlist including some or all of these. Just to set the mood.

Spotify has become part of my reading life. Not for everything, but today as I work my way through John Banville's The Sea, I am listening to music about the sea, like:

La Mer

Now I need to go find some more quiet sea music for my playlist "The Sea". Thank you, Ann Kingman, for introducing me to Spotify.

I will be back soon with a post on two books, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and The Sea, mentioned above. Both Irish writers, both Booker Prize winners for these particular books.

The Leopard

I finished The Leopard last week and have waited to write about it so I could gather my thoughts a bit. I share this book with the LibraryThing Legacy Library of author Robert Graves and it is one of my 2016 Reading Challenge books. It is a treasure, and I will definitely read it again. In fact, when finished, I was tempted to turn back to the beginning and start over. Beautifully written by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and a fascinating glimpse back in time to old Sicily when Princes ruled their isolated estates like Kings.

Our Prince is Don Fabrizio. He is based on the author's great-grandfather, Don Giulio Maria Fabrizio Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa. Set mostly in 1860 at the time of the "Risorgimento" led by Garibaldi, when Italy ceased to be two states, "...and the whole Italian peninsula would soon be one state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire". Don Fabrizio realizes this means the end of his way of life, and probably much of his fortune. He chooses to embrace it all hoping, as his nephew Tancredi tells him, "...everything must change so that everything can stay the same."

For an excellent review, go to JeffreyKeeten.com

Also, here is a link to the 1963 movie starring Burt Lancaster: The Leopard

I highly recommend the original version of this beautiful movie. It is long and slow-moving, but a feast for the eyes.

My copy of The Leopard is a TIME Reading Program Special Edition, published in 1966.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa

Library2Go

I love my local library. As a reader, of course I love it! Nowadays it has taken on a fresh new look. Comfortable easy chairs in a sleek art deco style, bright colors, indoor "patio" tables with bright colored umbrellas, a huge teepee, interesting displays, a full-sized plastic skeleton, "trader" paperbacks free for the taking, a wonderful dollhouse for my granddaughter to populate with her choice of toy people, dinosaurs, furniture, and a tiger (her favorite), plus the usual assortment of books, etc. For the past two years or so, I have been using the Library2Go Oregon Digital Library Consortium service too. This comes free with my library card.

I especially like to download audio books that I can listen to as I go about my daily routine. Usually I listen to British mysteries, you know, stories set in "peaceful" country villages where nothing ever happens. Ha!

I like writers such as P.D. James, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, M.C. Beaton, Agatha Christie, Elizabeth George and Deborah Crombie. The last two are American writers whose stories are set in Great Britain. There are many more I could list. Besides mysteries set in Great Britain, I also like to listen to Donna Leon's Detective Brunetti mysteries. These are set in Venice so I get a vicarious visit to that magical city with each new story.

 And, I like Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series, set in Sicily, so more vicarious travel.

One caveat with my choice of mystery books. I do not like realistic detective fiction. Spare me the autopsies, and psychopaths who build snowmen in the yards of their victims, or put body parts in the car boot. No thanks. Some of my writers throw in gruesome scenes but one is not taken into the mind of the killer. Elizabeth George is an exception, I guess. My "cosy" mysteries, where there IS murder, it is (for the most part) sanitized such that my delicate sensibilities can handle it.

So far in 2016, I have listened to sixteen audio books. They are not all mysteries. I have "read" Rosamunde Pilcher, Emile Zola, Anthony Trollope, and listened to an Arthur Miller play. OK, I'm a dreamer but isn't reading an escape, no matter how it is accomplished? At least with audio books, I get my chores finished!

And, a trip to the library is as easy as picking up my iPod. However, these days, I am making more trips in person to my local library. Sitting in a teepee is fun!

Do you listen to audio books? What have you "read" lately?

Truth and Vipers

"There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them." -- Isak Dinesan

Earlier today I pulled some books off the bottom shelf of my study bookcase. I had decided it was time to add more books to LibraryThing and these had been lurking in a dusty corner for far too long. As you see, there is a theme:

Back in the day, we were avid home wine makers (and drinkers!). We planted twenty pinot noir (Burgundy) vines in the backyard and took several wine making and tasting classes. It was so fun! We made our own wine for a few years. It was so-so, and eventually we moved on. But one of the best things we did was travel to France. We used "Adventures on the Wine Route" by Berkeley wine importer, Kermit Lynch, as our guide through French wine country. We had many of our own adventures and have never even once been sorry we made the trip.

We traveled by train from Paris to Dijon. In Dijon we picked up a rental car and spent the next two weeks driving around Burgundy, Provence, the Languedoc, and Bordeaux. Here are few pictures of Burgundy:

Wine "growler" shop in Gamay

Burgundy Scenes

The center photo was taken near Savigny-les-Beaune. We were there looking for a particular vineyard, "Les Serpentiers". We were never sure, but hoped this picture was the vineyard. According to the wine making brothers Pichenot, Kermit Lynch tells us in "Adventures on the Wine Route":

"Having always loved the vineyard name, "Les Serpentiers", which goes back to at least the thirteenth century, I ask if they know its origin.

"There are a lot of vipers there."

"Not really. There in the vineyard?"

"It's true Just ten days ago a young woman was bitten and spent a day in the hospital."


We did not encounter any vipers, but we did encounter friendly people, breathtaking scenery, and some fabulous wine. Truly.

A Horde of Rebels

"...reading, you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once..." -- Virginia Woolf

It is past time for an update on where we have been and where we are going on the Road Map journey. I have had the "rebels" on my tail for the past few weeks and I am glad to report they are harmless, and in fact, quite enlightening and entertaining.

Firstly, I can tick two of my 2016 To Be Read books off the list:

Millions of words have been written about Virginia Woolf, one of the early 20th century's vanguard novelists. She helped to bring the stream of consciousness style into being and because of this, her work is considered difficult. The Virginia Woolf Reader is like a See's Candy Christmas box. We get to taste bits from here and there, every one wrapped in bright foil paper with plenty of bows. Editor Mitchell Leaska chose well. There are bits from essays, novels, short stories, diaries, and letters. I did not read the diaries section because of this:

I really do not like to read extracts from diaries. I want the whole life story, as written by the diarist. This is Volume One of the definitive 4-volume set edited by Anne Bell with an introduction by her husband, Quentin Bell. Quentin is Virginia's nephew, son of her artist sister Vanessa. Quentin wrote this excellent biography:

Many years ago, I read To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, two of VW's most well-known works. I then read this biography and have been a "fan" (aka "Bloomsberry") ever since. Much more to come about Bloomsbury at a later date. VW lived in a time of great upheaval. She experienced the pain of loss at an early age and suffered from intermittent mental and emotional instability. This instability led to VW's suicide by drowning in 1941. Speculation has ranged from bi polar to schizophrenia. In the early 20th century, her malady was called "insanity". She was fortunate to have been born into the upper middle class or she might have spent her life in an asylum. Instead, she was cared for in hospitals and at home with private nurses. She was lucid most of the time and was a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, the famous set of authors, artists, intellectuals, and hangers-on who lived or met in the Bloomsbury area of London in the early years of the 20th century. Her life was rich, her writing was sublime, and I encourage you to investigate VW. Do not be "afraid".

In the 1920's, Virginia began a mild love affair with Vita Sackville-West. Vita was an aristocrat. Her family, the Sackvilles, have lived at Knole, one of England's largest country houses, since 1603. The vast estate was given to Vita's ancestor, Thomas Sackville by his cousin Queen Elizabeth I in 1566. The house dates to the late 15th century, with many additions over time. Vita became a celebrity in England in the early 20th century because of two famous court cases. In the first, Vita's mother was proven to be the legal heir to her father Lord Sackville (there was a question as to whether Lord Sackville ever married the Spanish dancer, "Pepita", Vita's grandmother). In the second, Vita's mother was proven to be entitled to a bequest made to her by one of her admirers. The English public was enamoured with Vita, the beautiful young heiress, and could not get enough of her and her family's public humiliation followed by triumph in the courts.

Vita was also a prolific writer. Her best known work these days is the novel, All Passion Spent. She married the diplomat, Harold Nicolson, at Knole in 1913. They were both bi-sexual and each had love affairs with both sexes. Vita and Virginia's affair was mild, mostly a meeting of great minds, as Vita was aware of Virginia's fragile emotional state, and did not want to harm her in any way.

In Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson, Vita's son, presents us with a view of the unusual marital arrangement between his parents, Harold and Vita. Theirs was an unbreakable love, a bond strong enough to withstand the emotional turmoil of passionate love affairs. By agreement, they gave each other the room to live their own separate lives, knowing they were each other's ROCK.

The book is divided into parts written by Vita and by Nigel, as well as excerpts of letters written by Vita and Harold. Vita had written an autobiography but locked it away in her tower writing room, unseen by anyone until after her death in 1962. Her son Nigel includes Vita's autobiography and his wider-view version of the same events Vita writes about. Most of the book is taken up with the drama around Vita's passionate love affair with Violet Keppel, which lasted over two years. Vita and Violet wanted to live together but had to run away from England to do so. This planned arrangement created turmoil and tremendous upheaval for everyone involved. Finally, getting as far as France, they break up and Vita returns to her family and begins a much quieter life of seclusion in the Kentish countryside. She and Violet were to meet and travel together a few more times, but the affair gradually wound down.

Vita and Harold had two sons, and created one of England's great tourist attractions: the gardens at Sissinghurst castle, their family home. Now owned by the National Trust, Sissinghurst was a refuge and the gardens their major project after the stormy first years of their marriage. As a female, Vita could not inherit Knole due to the laws of primogeniture. She mourned the loss of her family home to a male cousin. Virginia Woolf was aware of Vita's great sadness over the loss of Knole. She penned Orlando, her well-known novel of gender bending and time travel with Vita and Knole as her inspiration. I am currently reading Orlando and will give you my thoughts on it at a later date.

Sissinghurst Castle

(note the tower, upper center -- Vita's writing domain)

Finally, Portrait of a Marriage is a lasting tribute to a great love. The love of a man and woman for each other -- come what may. To most, it seems scandalous and a bit naughty that they were tolerant of each other's affairs, and they even refer to this perceived naughtiness in their letters to one another (Harold, as a diplomat, traveled extensively). In their view it was not naughty, rather a mature and generous agreement to allow each other the freedom to live, really live, their own one life in this world.

Referring to Vita's feelings for Virginia and for the effects on her husband Leonard, Harold says in his 2 December 1926 letter to Vita:

"I am far more worried for Virginia's and Leonard's sake than for ours. I know that for each of us the other is the magnetic north, and that though the needle may flicker and even get stuck at the other points, it will come back to the pole sooner or later."

Quite civilized, I must say.

Reading update:

Listened to two cosy mysteries using my library's digital download feature.

Read my cousin's first novel, The Wish and the Waterfall. Quite the good book, and a post on it to come at a later date. Way to go, Ken!

Currently reading A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, also on the 2016 TBR challenge and Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

I think that is it for now. I am not worried about the hordes! Ciao!