What are you reading?
- Words, words, words.
Sanguine: The blood that courses through the heart bringing the hope that all will be well.... somehow.
Genial: Engendering a like mood of being able to enjoy the present moment, its newness, expected still pristine, out of the past yet ordered differently.
Bulwer-Lytton is a very inventive writer, casting novel scenarios at will. Linguistic felicity does get the better of him betimes but you come to expect it. He, like many another with abounding descriptive powers, should not be let near nature. She is apt to overwhelm him. Here I think they are matched.
They passed then from the high road into a long succession of green pastures, through which a straight public path conducted them into one of those charming lanes never seen out of this bowery England,—a lane deep sunk amidst high banks with overhanging oaks, and quivering ash, gnarled wych-elm, vivid holly and shaggy brambles, with wild convolvulus and creeping woodbine forcing sweet life through all. Sometimes the banks opened abruptly, leaving patches of green sward, and peeps through still sequestered gates, or over moss-grown pales, into the park or paddock of some rural thane. New villas or old manor-houses on lawny uplands, knitting, as it were, together England’s feudal memories with England’s freeborn hopes,—the old land with its young people; for England is so old, and the English are so young! And the gray cripple and the bright-haired child often paused, and gazed upon the demesnes and homes of owners whose lots were cast in such pleasant places.
‘What will he do with it’ the novel by Lytton is a delightful read and being in the first quarter of it I won’t say much. Setbacks will be encountered by the pedestrian pair but all will come right in the end.
Otherwise I dip back into ‘Moby Dick’ for the challenge of the inconscient. Etienne Gilson with sublime clarity tells me ‘you were right all along about Realism’. Ask to prove it and you have already gone astray. Datta’s ‘Six Ways of Knowing’ is strong on ‘data’. What you are given has a certain shape. Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’, a picaresque ramble I am taking by chapters. Where on earth are they now? Is it on a map or just lost on the way to Coventry by way of Hull. Graham Greene’s stories are not quite genial but necessary. ‘The Last Word’ is a codicil to ‘Lord of the World'’ by Benson.
It’s 7:33 on a bright Summer morning. A lawn chair under the oak awaits after I break out some new ground for cucumber plants. ‘La Diva’ a new variety for me, the usual ‘marketmore’ not available. Am I sanguine?
