'A day of thaw...the sun, the blue of the sky, the broken ice, the mud, and the moving water turning the water into a dazzling mirror.'

--- Proust (cited in The Hare with Amber Eyes)

Jim Ede on HGB (via Peter Fuller)..."a continuing way of life..in which stray objects , stones, glass, pictures, sculpture in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability which more and more we need to recognize if we are not to be swamped by all that is rapidly opening up before us."

People on a bridge, 'it is like the start of the world: a litany of perfect movements and shadows'.

There's something like near perfection in walking on a bridge on a Sunday morning. A time when people stroll, are not concerned about going anywhere, and less like themselves, and therefore more like themselves.

'There is light in these rooms, trembling reflections and glints of silver and porcelain and polished fruitwood, and shadows from the linden trees.'

'The world had undergone an Umsturz, an overturning, and this led to a kind of heaviness in the things that made up their lives. Things now had to be preserved, sometimes even cherished.'

This really goes against a large part of my-well, not thinking, precisely; rather, my temperament, since apart from my books and cd's I don't think I really value any objects (or is it: have any objects of value?). Old Puritan roots, I guess. Something suspect about thinginess and the awkward relation between inner-worldliness and worldliness?Need or desire? No, that's not quite it either. Can there be a 'rational ordering' of our preferences, desires?

And yet, I'm strangely drawn to these sentiments. The world is either too much with us or not with us enough (Levertov). Never could decide! There's a kind of fanatical self-absorption in both hedonism and asceticism. What would it mean to have a 'proper' love of the world?

'...all these possessions, all these drawers full of things, these walls full of pictures-but they lost their sense of a future of manifold possibilities.'

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