And if we act now, we may still be able to save our city before it is too late.”įor the Most Beautiful by Emily Hauser (2016) It is the princes who live in the palaces on the windy heights of the city, and the slaves who draw water from the wells. “It is the fishermen who catch the silver fish in the bay,” I gestured out over the plain towards the sea, sparkling blue in the sunlight, “and sell them on the stalls of the marketplace. “It is the women who lay clothes to dry on the rooftops of Troy,” I continued. Is it any wonder that I cannot sink with these, that I cannot so forget my soul, as to live the life of brutes, and die the death more horrible because it dreams of waking? There is none to lead me forward, there is none to teach me right young as I am, I live beneath a curse that lasts for ever.

Meantime, all around me is violence and robbery, coarse delight and savage pain, reckless joke and hopeless death. The Queen’s Choice by Anne O’Brien (2016) I had an urgent negotiation to undertake. There it was, Henry’s declaration, as clear as my reflection in my mirror. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927) A steamer far out at sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed there curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine gauze which held things and kept them softly in its mesh, only gently swaying them this way and that. So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. “It’s just because she’s such a perfect lady. There was the rub: that Julia, who could get intimate with a trapeze artist after five minutes’ conversation – who was intimate with a salesman after buying a pair of shoes – had talked for an hour to her own daughter, about the girl’s own father and lover, without the least intimacy at all. It was used for all sorts of activities and gradually it was furnished with odds and ends of furniture. Gray that this particular kind of rhododendron was called Ponticum, so the secret hiding-place was called Ponticum House.

She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain.

A notebook in which quotations, poems, remarks, etc, that catch the owner’s attention are enteredĪ summary of this month’s reading, in words and pictures.

Rd blackmore books