Waxing Poetic: When We Two Parted by Lord George Gordon Byron

When We Two Parted
When we two parted In silence and tears, Half broken-hearted To sever for years, Pale grew thy cheek and cold, Colder thy kiss; Truly that hour foretold Sorrow to this. The dew of the morning Sunk chill on my brow-- It felt like the warning Of what I feel now. Thy vows are all broken, And light is thy fame; I hear thy name spoken, And share in its shame. They name thee before me, A knell to mine ear; A shudder comes o'er me-- Why wert thou so dear? They know not I knew thee, Who knew thee too well-- Long, long shall I rue thee, Too deeply to tell. In secret we met-- In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee After long years, How should I greet thee?-- With silence and tears.

The Art of Reading: Woman Reading by Alexander Deineka

Waxing Poetic: Two Poems by Leonard Cohen

Song ("I almost went to bed ...") from "The Spice-Box of Earth"

 
I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater

and how i kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I'd
never been your lover

Waiting for Marianne from "Flowers for Hitler" 

 
I have lost a telephone
with your smell in it
I am living beside the radio
all the stations at once
but I pick out a Polish lullaby
I pick it out of the static
it fades I wait I keep the beat
it comes back almost alseep
Did you take the telephone
knowing I'd sniff it immoderately
maybe heat up the plastic
to get all the crumbs of your breath
and if you won't come back
how will you phone to say
you won't come back
so that I could at least argue

The Art of Reading: Woman Reading Near a Goldfish Tank by Lovis Corinth

Bookish Quotes #40

“The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.”
~ Philip Adams

“Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.” 
~ Clifton Fadiman

Waxing Poetic: You, Darkness by Rainer Maria Rilke

     Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

 You, Darkness

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people-

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

The Art of Reading: The Book Lover by Frantisek Kupka

Bookish Quotes #39

“We human being build houses because we`re alive but we write books because we` re mortal. We live in groups because we`re sociable but we read because we know we`re alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one`s place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.”
~ Daniel Pennac

 “I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.”
~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

Rules of Civility - Amor Towles

     I hesitated before beginning this book.  The setting was right:  1930's New York.  The plot seemed good:  the story of a watershed year in the life of a twenty-five year old woman whose intellect, wit, and nerve lead her from a secretarial pool on Wall Street, to a position in the executive suites of Conde-Nast publishers and into the upper echelons of New York society.  My problem: her name - Katey Kontent.  Does some little something ever turn you away from a novel?  Well, I'm glad I ignored her name and dove into Rules of Civility.  It's a journey I'm glad I didn't miss.
     When the novel opens, it is 1966.  Katey is attending the opening of Many Are Called, an exposition of Walker Evans photographs taken in the late 1930s on a New York subway with a hidden camera, when she spots a familiar face.  Behind the scruffy, work-worn exterior she sees the face of Tinker Gray and she is transported back to New Year's eve, 1937.
     That night, Katey and her roommate Eve meet Tinker Grey at nightclub and the most memorable year of her life is set in motion.  Tinker is a handsome, enigmatic banker with royal blue eyes who is clearly upper class.  Of course they both fall for him.  But things go awry when Tinker crashes his car with both girls in it and Eve is seriously wounded.  Tinker, who lives his life according to George Washington's Rules of Civility, takes her recovery in his hands and, as she heals, they become a pair - in spite of the fact that Katey knows she is the one he cares for. 
     The memory of Tinker is always with her as she grasp at every tidbit of news of him and Eve,  When the two of them separate, Tinker appears in Katey's life again but she learns he is not all he lead her to believe.  Just as she has him again, she finds out he apparently never got around to reading the last of Washington's Rules of Civililty:  "Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience."  A shocking development reveals that not only has Tinker deceived her but that from the moment she met him someone else entirely is deciding all of their fates.
     Katey is a strong, spunky girl who is swept up into the New York of the 1930s:  jazz music, martinis, and jet-set parties.  She makes her way in a world where everyone is aiming to move to the top - inventing and reinventing themselves as they go along.  In that memorable year of 1938, fortunes are made and lost, lifestyles rise and fall, and meetings and choices made in a moment change lives forever.
     Amor Towles has written an engaging tale that brings the 1930s to life with vivid period detail.

~ Frances

Waxing Poetic: The Good Morrow by John Donne

 

 The Good Morrow

 

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,

Which watch not one another out of fear;

For love, all love of other sights controls,

And makes one little room an everywhere.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we find two better hemispheres,

Without sharp north, without declining west?

Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

The Art of Reading: The Artist's Wife by Henry Lamb

Bookish Quotes #38

"The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading."
~ Edith Wharton

"Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper."
~ David Quaimen