"Usually, if you talk to strangers in England, they resist being drawn. Fear of boredom, quite as much as fear of the possibility that one might be mad or sexually unreliable, explains their reticence. My uncle was impervious to any of the signals which might be given off on such occasion that the stranger might rather be left in peace. So urgent was his need to talk about Lampitts that any excuse must be found... His interlocutors would be truly puzzled, possibly edging away, wondering why this snowy-haired stranger... Should be addressing them on the subject of a family of whom they had never before heard." A.N. Wilson, "Incline Our Hearts", the first in a series of novels called "The Lampitt Chronicles"
And this one, from a piece in the New Yorker, exquisitely beautiful...
"There was the sound of harp and the clear singing of the minstrel; there spake he that had knowledge to unfold from far-off days the first beginning of men, telling how the Almighty wrought the earth, a vale of bright loveliness that the waters encircle..." From J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of "Beowulf".
No comments:
Post a Comment