even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: sunny, clear and cold

imaginary outfit: sunny, clear and cold

We are on the bare edge of spring. The sun is out, and the sky, if not quite brilliant, is at least blue and nearly clear. The coldness in the air feels a little kinder and less cruel - if not a kiss, still not a slap. Red-green alien shoots have appeared in the flower beds by my stoop, and the birds are singing like mad. It is the season for heavy cotton sweaters.

I am having a hard time staying inside. Yesterday was bitter, but it is back in the 40s today - prime walking weather. On a day like this, I feel like I could step out of my apartment and walk forever - past the usual blocks, past the familiar Duane Reades and fruit stands, beyond the regular boundaries of habit. I could walk from my neighbor river to the stranger ones, or down to the tip of the island, where the ferries live.

This Sunday is a working one for me. That's half the weekend lost, so I think today is the day for rambling. Time to hunt up my walking shoes.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: sunny, clear and cold

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