Author Archives: oook

Found in the barn

We’ve been cleaning up stuff in the Nova Scotia house, opening boxes that haven’t seen the light of day in 10 and even 20 years. One contained this set of favorite coffee cups of the past:
once-favorite coffee cups

I can remember the feel of each of them, and recall the sense of loss as, one by one, their handles broke and a successor had to be chosen from the trove of Karen Truesdell cups. The cleanup task has had lots of similar moments of remembrance.

Excruciating

via BoingBoing:

I’ve never seen an analysis of ballet classes as rite de passage for females of certain age range and class (or the not-unrelated horse-craziness either), but something of the sort cries out to be written. I’m forever grateful that my own daughter was completely uninterested in either ballet or horses when she was in those perilous ages.

Glorious sentence

It’s the most delicious pleasure to linger over bits of prose like this, where every word and clause is artfully placed to inform the reader:

Since those moments on the terrace, Harold had daily become more of the solicitous and indirectly beseeching lover; and Esther, from the very fact that she was weighed on by thoughts that were painfully bewildering to her –by thoughts which, in their newness to her young mind, seemed to shake her belief that life could be anything else than a compromise with things repugnant to the moral taste– had become more passive to his attentions at the very time that she had begun to feel more profoundly that in accepting Harold Transome she left the high mountain air, the passionate serenity of perfect love for ever behind her, and must adjust her wishes to a life of middling delights, overhung with the langourous haziness of motiveless ease, where poetry was only literature, and the fine ideas had to be taken down from the shelves of the library when her husband’s back was turned.
(George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical pg 426)