There's something mysterious and beautiful about the flowers and plants that grown in the Underground, a dazzling darkness that seems ageless...
Life, full of ambiguities, uncertainties, stray reflections, random chances. It's been like that from the first day..it's only that you walk into the mystery right now.
The day starts of grey and sombre, the cloud cover thick and universal, the rain steady but light. But by late afternoon the sun flares, and time starts to be found again in this new, lyrical brightness. Between the tunnels there's an open stretch, light flooding down upon it, the lilacs gently swaying in the summer breeze, the sudden play of light and shade.
You walk past all the people distractedly going home, but you also see three members of some amateur music group (two lean and long haired men and a woman with strong, determined features in contrast to her soft eyes). You only hear one of the men near the Royal London Hospital say "Yeah" but it's said with such self-assuredness, such knowingness, that you could be forgiven for believing this man has proclaimed some great truth with the utmost naturalness and simplicity. Strange to think that as the day ends for some, so it begins for others.
Near the library, which you only saunter to to kill some time, there's the potent smell of fish. The Bengalis, with strong arms and tired hands pull the green and white tarpaulins down. How ancient this gesture! Sixty years ago you would have seen exactly the same co-ordination of mind, eye, and hand; would have seen the exact same thoughts of home flash across faces, the same looking out into empty space, the recognition of a hard day's work done...On the opposite side of the street, the pencil thin arms of a cross, gleaming amidst the lost light. Near the restaurant, the old brick houses, high windows, the clouds radiant, swimming across the sky..the East is dilapidated, run down, for sure, but for a moment this is like a scene from a Vermeer.
Today, Michael Foot's Debts of Honour comes in the post. Beautifully produced and a bargain at 64p.
'Books are, to me, the last link with the beautiful in England...the margins of the page are browned and there's room to read. The sober blank verse is widely spaced and...easy to the eye because it's so spaciously arranged on the page.The whole book is as delicately proportioned as a Greek temple.'
Life, full of ambiguities, uncertainties, stray reflections, random chances. It's been like that from the first day..it's only that you walk into the mystery right now.
The day starts of grey and sombre, the cloud cover thick and universal, the rain steady but light. But by late afternoon the sun flares, and time starts to be found again in this new, lyrical brightness. Between the tunnels there's an open stretch, light flooding down upon it, the lilacs gently swaying in the summer breeze, the sudden play of light and shade.
You walk past all the people distractedly going home, but you also see three members of some amateur music group (two lean and long haired men and a woman with strong, determined features in contrast to her soft eyes). You only hear one of the men near the Royal London Hospital say "Yeah" but it's said with such self-assuredness, such knowingness, that you could be forgiven for believing this man has proclaimed some great truth with the utmost naturalness and simplicity. Strange to think that as the day ends for some, so it begins for others.
Near the library, which you only saunter to to kill some time, there's the potent smell of fish. The Bengalis, with strong arms and tired hands pull the green and white tarpaulins down. How ancient this gesture! Sixty years ago you would have seen exactly the same co-ordination of mind, eye, and hand; would have seen the exact same thoughts of home flash across faces, the same looking out into empty space, the recognition of a hard day's work done...On the opposite side of the street, the pencil thin arms of a cross, gleaming amidst the lost light. Near the restaurant, the old brick houses, high windows, the clouds radiant, swimming across the sky..the East is dilapidated, run down, for sure, but for a moment this is like a scene from a Vermeer.
Today, Michael Foot's Debts of Honour comes in the post. Beautifully produced and a bargain at 64p.
'Books are, to me, the last link with the beautiful in England...the margins of the page are browned and there's room to read. The sober blank verse is widely spaced and...easy to the eye because it's so spaciously arranged on the page.The whole book is as delicately proportioned as a Greek temple.'
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