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Maurice Denis, Avril ou Les anémones, 1891.
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Glimpses into Plant Life by Eliza Brightwen, in the collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.As described in the catalog of Honey and Wax Books:
"First edition of Glimpses into Plant Life (1897) by eccentric English naturalist Eliza Brightwen, in a publisher’s binding depicting a skeleton leaf. Born in 1830, Brightwen spent most of her life as an invalid, homebound and depressed at her country house, The Grove. After her husband’s death in 1883, however, Brightwen rallied. Her nephew recalled: 'As her physical strength increased she ventured to explore her lawns and shrubberies; she dared still further, into her woods and meadows; she wandered around her lake, and even, in a broad boat, upon it; she actually quitted her domain and explored the densely-wooded common that hemmed it in upon two sides. She discovered in herself a remarkable gift of natural magic.'"
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Arnold Friedman, Still Life with White Vase, ca. 1942-1946. Via Peter Shear.
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Beaded maple-leaf coin purse, "suitable for your credit cards and identity documents."
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A clear, crispy day—dry and breezy air, full of oxygen. Out of the sane, silent, beauteous miracles that envelop and fuse me—trees, water, grass, sunlight, and early frost—the one I am looking at most today is the sky. It has that delicate, transparent blue, and the only clouds are little or larger white ones, giving their still and spiritual motion to the great concave. All through the earlier day (say from seven to eleven) it keeps a pure yet vivid blue. But as noon approaches, the color gets lighter, quite gray for two or three hours—then still paler for a spell, till sundown—which last I watch dazzling through the interstices of a knoll of big trees—darts of fire and a gorgeous show of light yellow, liver-color, and red, with a vast silver glaze askance on the water—the transparent shadows, shafts, sparkle, and vivid colors beyond all the paintings ever made.
I don’t know what or how, but it seems to me mostly owing to these skies (every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before), have had this autumn some wondrously contented hours—may I not say perfectly happy ones? As I have read, Byron just before his death told a friend that he had known but three happy hours during his whole existence. Then there is the old German legend of the king’s bell, to the same point. While I was out there by the wood, that beautiful sunset through the trees, I thought of Byron’s and the bell story, and the notion started in me that I was having a happy hour. (Though perhaps my best moments I never jot down; when they come I cannot afford to break the charm by inditing memoranda. I just abandon myself to the mood and let it float on, carrying me in its placid ecstasy.)
What is happiness, anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like of it?—so impalpable—a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure—so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt.
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days.
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And what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,
A mist retreating from the morning sun,
A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length?—A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought;
And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.
John Clare, from "What is Life?"
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Meghan O’Gieblyn on Marguerite Young: "All her books are, to some extent, about failed searches for paradise."
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"One of the most vast and unique perfume collections in the world already sits improbably in a California strip mall. It’s part sanctuary, part treasure map, and entirely shaped by a woman who has devoted her life to the art of finding what’s worth smelling."
"Ultimately, I am a strange person who cannot fit neatly into reality."
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"Ultimately, I am a strange person who cannot fit neatly into reality."
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I yearn for a serious yet creative American political writer, like the British novelist and queen of reportage Rebecca West, who could think deeply and in crazy detail about important events that were recent, imminent, or actually happening. I’m sometimes irritated at the play of her mind as too free; I want to shout at her that I’m not interested in the a complete tour of the setting in which the Cold-War-era spy William Marshall was arrested ... I’m sometimes put off by West’s emotional partisanship, almost certainly an effect of her hard-knocks youth ... But West’s dedication to work, to visiting and revisiting and going far off the beaten path, to interviewing and reading and writing and rewriting and republishing, sometimes over a span of decades when she was developing a single subject, paid off in super-large understanding.
Sarah Ruden, writing on Rebecca West for Book Post, 4/23/2025.
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In other news: Days are getting longer.
