the evening party

This was the perfect book with which to finish off the year. A richer experience I could not have asked for. When you are faced with a will to create such as this one, you can't help but feel transformed. I was dead to much I experienced for many months. It was a self imposed numbness, based on a conviction that my desires were faulty, and my dreams worthless. But as I brought out my little green highlighter, and began to mark the passages that made me swoon, I realized that I could no longer hold back my love. Be it for woman, book, or tree, every vision is worth having. And if I allow myself to envision beauty, then I shall possess it. And I shall be happy.

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'The dawn, even when it is cold and melancholy, never fails to shoot through my limbs as with arrows of sparkling piercing ice. I pull aside the thick curtains, and search for the first glow in the sky which shows that life is breaking through. And with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest. From my window I look down upon the church yard, where so many of my ancestors are buried, and in my prayer I pity those poor dead men who toss perpetually on the old recurring waters; for I see them circling and eddying forever upon a pale tide. Let us, then, who have the gift of the present, use it and enjoy it: That I confess, is part of my morning prayer.' - The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn

'I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's night standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon the earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strage in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious professes up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes...One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavements, living rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree.' - The Mark on the Wall

'For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water lillies, the first red water lillies I'd ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn't paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only - it was so precious - the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life.' - Kew Gardens

'Don't you remember, in early childhood, when, in play or talk, as one stepped across the puddle or reached the window on the landing, some imperceptible shock froze the universe to a solid ball of crystal which one held for a moment...' - 'It's an easy thing to confess one's faults. But what dusk is deep enough to hide one's virtues? I love, I adore - no, I can't tell you what a rose of worship my soul is - the names trembles on my lips - for Shakespeare.' - The Evening Party

'John, who had exclaimed “Politics be damned!” began burrowing his fingers down, down, into the sand. As his hand went further and further beyond the wrist, so that he had to hitch his sleeve a little higher, his eyes lost their intensity, or rather the background of thought and experience which gives an inscrutable depth to the eyes of grown people disappeared, leaving only the clear transparent surface, expressing nothing but wonder, which the eyes of young children display. No doubt the act of burrowing in the sand had something to do with it.' - Solid Objects

'The pointed fingers of glass hang downwards. The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers of the lustre drop green upon the marble. The feathers of parakeets­ their harsh cries­ sharp blades of palm trees­ green, too; green needles glittering in the sun. But the hard glass drips on to the marble; the pools hover above the desert sand; the camels lurch through them; the pools settle on the marble; rushes edge them; weeds clog them; here and there a white blossom; the frog flops over; at night the stars are set there unbroken. Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the mantlepiece; the ruffled surface of ocean. No ships come; the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky. It's night; the needles drip blots of blue. The green's out.' - Blue & Green

"Quite alone" Mrs. Sutton repeated. That was what she could not conceive, she said, with a despairing swoop of her dark bright haired head - being happy, quite alone. "Yes" he said. In happiness there is always this terrific exaltation. It is not high spirits; nor rapture; nor praise, fame or health, it is a mystic state, a trance, and ecstasy which, for all that he was atheistic, skeptical, unbaptised, and all the rest of it, had, he suspected, some affinity with the ecstasy that turned men into priests, sent women in the prime of life trudging the streets with starched cyclamen-like frills about their faces, and set lips and stone eyes; but with this difference; them it prisoned; him it set free. It freed him from all dependence upon anyone upon anything' - Happiness

'It was so that Julia looked too, as she sat half turned on the music stool, smiling. It’s on the field, it’s on the pane, it’s in the sky—beauty; and I can’t get at it; I can’t have it—I, she seemed to add, with that little clutch of the hand which was so characteristic, who adore it so passionately, would give the whole world to possess it! And she picked up the carnation which had fallen on the floor, while Fanny searched for the pin. She crushed it, Fanny felt, voluptuously in her smooth veined hands stuck about with water–coloured rings set in pearls. The pressure of her fingers seemed to increase all that was most brilliant in the flower; to set it off; to make it more frilled, fresh, immaculate.' - Moments of Being

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