books, candles and wine bottles

I read a wonderful book last winter. It has magic doors opening from our world into an underground labyrinth filled with books, candles and wine bottles (what more could you wish for?), mystery, bees, time travel, books where you read about yourself, a sea of honey ... I could go on. 

I'll just give you a few excerpts from Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea:

Zachary picks a different hall to wander down, this one has shelves carved into the stone, books piled in irregular cubbies along with teacups and bottles and stray crayons. [...] 

There are so many candles that the scent of beeswax permeates everything, soft and sweet mingling with paper and leather and stone with a hint of smoke. Who lights all of these if there's no one else here? Zachary wonders as he passes a candelabra holding more than a dozen smoldering tapers, wax dripping down over the stone that has clearly been dripped on by many, many candles before.

One door opens into a round room with intricately carved walls. A single lamp sits on the floor and as Zachary walks around it the light catches different parts of the carvings, revealing images and text but he cannot read the whole story.

 ..

Zachary picks up her glass of wine from the table and takes a sip of it. It tastes like winter sun and melting snow, bubbles bright and sharp and bursting.

 ..

He takes a book from a stack near the wall and puts it down again. He wanders down a hallway lined with curving shelves so the books surround him at all angles, like a tunnel. He cannot tell how the ones above his head manage not to fall. 

He tries opening doors. Some are locked but many open, revealing rooms filled with more books, chairs an desks and tables with bottles of ink and bottles of wine and bottles of brandy. The sheer volume of books intimidates him. He does not know how one would choose what to read.

He hears more people than he sees, footsteps and whispers close but unseen. He spots a figure in a white robe lighting candles and a woman so absorbed in the book she is reading that she does not look up as he passes.

He walks through a hall filled with paintings, all images of impossible buildings. Floating castles. Mansions melded together with ships. Cities carved into cliffs. The books around them all seem to be volumes on architecture. A corridor leads him to an amphitheater where actors appear to be rehearsing Shakespeare.

more savouring, less swearing

The life improvement program I set up for myself after last summer has not been satisfactorily executed.

In fact, it's probably fair to say it's a laughable shambles.

Tiredness have ruined so many attempts at improving myself. Giving up sugar should really be next on my improvement list. 

But perhaps I'm a little more merciful towards myself.

So here's the list of areas where I have improved: walking in twilight, stuttering in two foreign languages, writing unpublishable fiction, enjoying books, making the most of quiet evenings, helping my mother, standing up for myself, loving trees, getting things done, savouring moments, choosing personal protective equipment, not swearing so much in traffic.

dying unicorns and such

What I have today: 

A dying unicorn, faraway voices, a damp fog and laundry that's not drying, a spicy red candle.

darling books: calamity physics

One of my favourite books of all time: Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

I'm rereading it and wondering which friend I could recommend it to. I have quite a few friends but can't think of a single one with the right mindset to thoroughly enjoy it.

It's a strange mix. A text heavily laden with literary references and philosophical ponderings, shaped like a mock-academic syllabus, yet such a pageturner that I stay up way too late reading. A thriller with many twists. I remember the heart-wrenching ending, yet when I'm rereading the book for the third time - though it's been a few years since the last time - I can't puzzle out the mystery until the end. Maybe not even then.

When I finish it, my insides ache with grief but my mind is yelling that I need to go out and live my life.

Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.

  "Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze."

  Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldn't have my Magnificent Reason until I was at least seventy, with liver spots, rheumatism, wit as quick as a carving knife, a squat stucco house in Avignon (where I could be found eating 365 different cheeses), a lover twenty years my junior who worked in the fields (I don't know what kind of fields - any kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name.

a choir on white wings

The choir of seagulls is persistent and constant and doesn't even disturb my sleep anymore. Nothing is so omnipresent in this city during spring and summer as that noise, and the sight of white wings.

The sun swings wildly towards the north, landing further out in the sea every evening. I take my birdsong app out. I breathe in dust and sag with weariness. I'm not sure what I need right now.