eftermiddagen på stadsbiblioteket

Geraldine from Hilary Brashear on Vimeo.

 

~

 

"Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madman who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."

- James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

 

 

~

 

vad betyder detta för dig?

 

ofta man identifierar med en charakter, eller en typ av person, i en roman. men varför? jag trodde att James Baldwin hade en intressanta bild av det här process; alla av oss väljer någon, är det därför vi vill minnas, eller därför vi vill glömma?

 

~

 

Reading: Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin (among others)

Listening to: Pixx - A Way to Say Goodbye

Last watched: The Summer of Sangaile



"an enclosed and enchanted garden"

Sebastian... said, 'I must go to the Botanical Gardens.'

'Why?'

'To see the ivy.'

It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.

'I've never been to the Botanical Gardens,' I said.

'Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don't know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.'

When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be real.

- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

 





 

 

 

 

"And I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all..." [a selection of recent journal extracts]

 

sun. 13 march
[a dream] ...then we were standing at a hill that was so steep we had to climb by sticking our hands and feet intovthe crumbl[ing] red soil. I was so close to this hill wall that I had to keep my head turned to the side, my cheek pressing against the cool earth. When we reached the top, the dream disappeared.
 

sun. 20 march
Tossed and turned all night. Woke up and made camomile tea kl 04.30.
 

[that evening] 8 glasses later and everyone was quite drunk... I got involved in a long and passionate discussion about the state of UK politics.
 

tues. 29 march
Heavy with tiredness that seems to sink into my skin. The whiteness of the clouds send blue and green glowing against my eyelids... I feel displaced out of time, place, person.
 

fri. 1 april
"I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man sense the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?"
- What I Loved, Siri Hustvedt
 

sat. 2 april
I mourn [the loss of a dear correspondent] not because I wouldn't ever find someone who loves et in arcadia ego, but rather because I felt in a way that it was the ~our~ time of the same thing - lying in the sun, reading, "And I, Tyresias, have foresuffered all...", the letters, the rose-tinted exuberance of youth... as summer approaches, the flush of youth,  and poetry, and love blooms up again - it feels like losing a part of one's self, or having it locked away and not being able to find the key to draw it out again.