One of my favourites that I came across again in July on a brochure for Landmark Education:

The future enters into us,
in order to transform itself in us,
long before it happens.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

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Also read in July the wonderfully cheering The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby.  The book is the story of what happened to Bauby, the former editor-in-chief of French Elle, when he suffered a major stroke at the age of 43 resulting in “locked-in” syndrome.  It was famously dictated to his speech therapist, letter by letter, by means of blinking his eye. 

Just 15 minutes reading before bed would ensure mild and lovely dreams. 

Of the one-sided phone calls he has with his family:

My daughter, Celeste, tells me of her adventures with her pony.  In five months she will be nine.  My father tells me how hard it is to stay on his feet.  He is fighting undaunted through his ninety-third year.  These two are the outer links of the chain of love that surrounds and protects me.

Of his trip to Lourdes with a former girlfriend, Josephine, years ago:

While Josephine took her turn in the bathroom, I pounced, clad only in a towel, on that supreme oasis of the thirsty: the minibar.  First I downed a half-bottle of mineral water at one swallow.  Divine bottle, never will I forget the touch of your glass neck on my parched lips!

Then I poured a glass of champagne for Josephine and a gin and tonic for myself.  Having thus performed my barman duties, I was furtively considering a strategic withdrawal to the adventures of Charles Sobraj [the book called Trail of the Snake he’s been reading the whole trip which had cast a spell over him] … The next day … we rolled into Lourdes.  The heat was suffocating.  Josephine was driving; I sat beside her.  And Trail of the Snake, swollen and dog-eared, was relegated to the backseat.  I had not dared lay a finger on it since morning, Josephine having decided that my passion for the exotic saga masked a lack of interest in her.

Of the responses he receives to the monthly bulletin he sends to his friends and family:

I receive remarkable letters … Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence.  And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially … Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep.  Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest.

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On holiday in Central Australia, re-discovered The Guardian Weekly.   Read an article, “A violent blast against the past,” by Alex Danchev about the Italian Futurist movement of the early 20th century.  It featured the following quotation:

What they were against was far-reaching and ill-sorted.  They were against sadness, moonlight, sentimentalised love, syntax, monotony, the tango, Parsifal, Venice, marriage, the papacy, modesty, museums, English art, verisimilitude, the nude (“we demand, for 10 years, the total suppression of the nude in painting”) and, perhaps most surprisingly, “that idiotic gastronomic fetish of the Italians”, pasta.

And from the same journal I read a review by Oliver Marre of a new book of Isaiah Berlin letters called Enlightening: Letters 1946-60, Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes.   It featured the following quotation from one of Berlin’s letters to a barrister friend about  travelling through Russia with the Oxford don, Maurice Bowra:

What is the use, one asks oneself, of one’s own carefully wrought, shy, unerring taste, if that is what one’s friends are really like?

*****

Image: Gino Severini, The Dance of the Pan-Pan at the “Monico,” 1909-1911