It has been another very busy week at work and I have been studying hard for my OU course in the evenings (and over a delicious vanilla latte at lunch today). But this evening I am rebelling, and taking some time out to play! Messing around with torn paper and oil pastels and paint, being silly and inconsequential and ENJOYING it immensely:)
Now I’m off to have a shower, then some more painting and I shall round the evening off with a short story (still dithering between some more Borges or something from The Ladies of Grace Adieu) and then I shall round the evening off with some season 3 Buffy!
My song of the day: ’Some Surprise‘, Lisa Hannigan and Gary Lightbody (seriously, I have listened to this at least 20 times today!)
I have chosen Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss as my next novel and starting it today I was arrested by this wonderful passage quoted at the start. It is from one of my very favourite writers, Jorge Luis Borges.
Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault in the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like someone who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.
* * * *
Previously on Bad Faery: you might also find this entry of interest You Learn
Rocketing right up my favourite books chart is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go which I just finished reading yesterday. I’m glad that I had avoided reviews for it in advance as part of the pleasure in reading it was in the gradual discovery of the exact nature of the lives of the characters.
So I’m not going to explain any of the plot and only say that it is haunting and poignant and utterly heart breaking. And it is one of those stories that stays with you after, so much so that today I had to tell myself off several times for grieving for what were after all only imaginary characters.
I hadn’t read Ishiguro before but I’ll certainly be adding him to my future reading list.
