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A photograph of unpeeled apples by Richard Tepe, ca. 1900-1930. The Rijksmuseum.
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Bruised stone apple, from the archives of criticalEYEfinds.
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"Apples," folio 48 (verso), from Florilegium (A Book of Flower Studies), 1608. The Cleveland Museum of Art.
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The composer's white summer suit rests on a hanger in his study; his broad-brimmed Borsalino and stick are on a nearby table. Here is the Steinway grand he was given on his fiftieth birthday (though he composed in head, not on the piano); there is a run of the National Geographic Magazine covering the last five years of his life. On the Russian oak desk at which he worked from the time of his marriage in 1892 lies the wooden ruler Aino carved for him, with which he ruled his scores; also, an empty box of Corona cigars, and an elegant Tiffany photo frame, containing a portrait of Aino, through which the light streams. Open on the desk is a facsimile score of his greatest symphony, the Fourth. But the homely is never far away: in the kitchen, screwed to the wall, is an apple-coring machine Sibelius brought back from one of his trips to America. Made of black cast-iron, it is a Heath Robinsony contraption of prongs, screws, and blades that will peel, core, and slice your apple at the turn of the handle. From the same trip he also brought his wife a Tiffany diamond; but it is the apple-corer that sticks in the mind.
Julian Barnes, from "Ainola: Music and Silence." The Lives of Houses, ed. by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee.
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The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an orchard. You pick them up from under your feet but to bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of strange-colored pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you notice their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gayety, they seem to ask to be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe.
Henry James, from New England: An Autumn Impression, 1905. Via The New York Review.
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The white October sun circles Kirchstetten
With colours of chrysanthemums in gardens,
And bronze and golden under wiry boughs,
A few last apples gleam like jewels.
Stephen Spender, from "Auden's Funeral."
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I always think of those curious long autumn walks with which we ended a summer holiday, talking of what we were going to do–‘autumn plans’ we called them. They always had reference to painting and writing and how to arrange social life and domestic life better … They were always connected with autumn, leaves falling, the country getting pale and wintry, our minds excited at the prospect of lights and streets and a new season of activity beginning–October the dawn of the year.
Virginia Woolf, writing to her sister Vanessa Bell, ca. September 1927.
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