Cornflower Books

A good aim in life

    "It was one of Mr. Beebe's chief pleasures to provide people with happy memories."

      E.M. Forster, A Room with a View.

      Thanks to all the London friends we saw last week who gave us such an excellent time and thus very happy memories. Here's to our next trip south!

Letters from home

   

    "There were letters for her at the bureau - one from her brother, full of athletics and biology; one from her mother, delightful as only her mother's letters could be. She read in it of the crocuses which had been bought for yellow and were coming up puce, of the new parlourmaid, who had watered the ferns with essence of lemonade, of the semi-detached cottages which were ruining Summer Street, and breaking the heart of Sir Harry Otway. She recalled the free, pleasant life of her home, where she was allowed to do everything, and where nothing ever happened to her. The road up through the pine-woods, the clean drawing-room, the view over the Sussex Weald - all hung before her bright and distinct, but pathetic as the pictures in a gallery to which, after much experience, a traveller returns."

    E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

Another time, another place

    "[...] I am fighting - and losing - a battle against a longing to return to another time, another place. My head is full of David Copperfield. Barkis flicking at his horse as the cart makes its way, so slowly, along the dusty empty lanes, past the dog roses and the wild marshes, the scent of honeysuckle, and Peggotty emerging from a hedge, shaking off the pollen, the butterflies rising in clouds, Peggotty drawing sandwiches and cakes from her floury apron. And here too, of course, is Enid [Blyton]. Always Enid. In her little village under a lovely, clear blue sky. The jolly policeman calling out good day. The angler, dozing with his cider-filled basket by the bulrush-fringed pond. The ancient oak on the green. Wading through golden meadows, with cornflowers and poppies, foxgloves and scabious, the buttercups and the daisies, tansy and clover and the warm, sunlit aroma of wild thyme. Skylarks on high, the boom of the bittern. What is this? Where does it all come from? [...]"

    From Footnotes: A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers by Peter Fiennes - of which more soon.

Friends old and new

    "If you cannot read all your books...fondle them - peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances."

    I've taken those lines of Churchill's from Louise Penny's November newsletter; while "arranged" doesn't really apply to the shelves above, I do know where things are, and the mixture of the eagerly anticipated and the already loved is a comforting one - good old friends and attractive new acquaintances, side by side.

Good lines: on storytelling

 

    "Once he got going, my grandfather's way of telling a story was to go pell-mell, throwing Aristotle's unities of action, place and time into the air and in a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth. He had grown up in an age when storytelling was founded on the forthright principles of passing the time and dissolving the hours of dark. [...] To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenets of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion. And because in Faha, like in all country places, time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone else's, time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human beings had to be long, not to say convoluted, had to be so long that they wouldn't, and in fact couldn't, be finished this side of the grave, and only for the fire gone out and the birds of dawn singing might be continuing still."

Niall Williams, This Is Happiness

Books do furnish a room

    "There was an oak table in the middle of the room spread with a white cloth and red and white breakfast china, and there was a settle by the fire and a couple of hard oak chairs, but no other furniture and no pictures or ornaments. But the room did not need them because of the books, which stood there upon the shelves breathing out a friendliness that seemed to furnish and ornament the room [...] Maria had no doubt that the loving usage that had turned the books into living creatures was Old Parson's [...]"

    Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse - such a joy!

Thought for the day

    "Adults tend to forget - or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves - what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things.

    But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot - to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It's like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven't understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can't wear out a book's patience."

    Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

A man o' pairts

   

    "John Buchan's career as a writer, one of the best-selling of his day, would have been remarkable, even in someone who had done nothing else. He wrote more than a hundred books, including twenty-seven novels, six substantial biographies, a monumental twenty-four-volume contemporary account of the First World War, three works of political philosophy and a legal textbook. There were also dozens of poems and short stories, and about a thousand articles for newspapers and periodicals. As well as a writer, he was a scholar and an antiquarian and, at various times, a barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, publisher, director of wartime propaganda, Member of Parliament, and imperial proconsul. He had been a skilled and intrepid mountaineer in his youth and was always a dedicated fisherman and a prodigious walker. And he did all this while suffering from debilitating illness for most of his adult life."

Ursula Buchan, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan.

On chance

   

     "There was a fractional pause while the ambiguous world of chance, which is a mingle of genes and character and circumstance and sometimes a rare flash of good luck, hovered about them, offering and withdrawing and offering again evanescent possibilities, alluring, perilous, disturbing, awaiting their cue to become a living element in their tangled history."

    Salley Vickers, The Librarian.

 

Pictured is the endpaper from the handsome hardback edition.

A bucket for the memory well

 

    "This is a book of short pieces in verse or prose, an attempt to recover or otherwise conjure up a particular time (the 1940s), a particular Black Country town (Oldbury) and a particular childhood (mine). There is, I will confess, some unreliability here. I start with good intentions and a true memory - day-old chicks, street lamps, a clip round the ear - but soon, often as not, the fictional habit kicks in and I am led astray. One sentence lures me on to another, has the seeds of another in it, or is a template almost. Like knitting, that first row of stitches which sets up the rest. Or a rhyme reveals, or the need to avoid a rhyme reveals, some possibility. And I follow."

    Allan Ahlberg, The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood.    

    That passage, and the book's epigraph (below), seem to link neatly to the final paragraph in yesterday's post.

    "If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it."

    William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Appreciation

 

    "Where sensei denotes the respect you owe to your teachers, go-on is a more general respect you owe to anyone who has taken good care of you. The concept of go-on developed in an ancient feudal era to describe the bond between the lord and the samurai. The price of the lord's protection was paid in go-on, gratitude expressed through absolute loyalty.

    Today, on is a feeling of appreciation towards the people who have been a friend to you or looked after you. You would go beyond your calling to help or support the giver of on - not because you are motivated by guilt or obligation but by the genuine desire to return the help that you have received. On is everywhere, between you and your parents, friends, co-workers, maybe even strangers. It is a beautiful tie that strengthens the connections between people in society."

    From Ikigai and other Japanese words to live by by Mari Fujimoto.

    I'll write more about the book soon but I wanted to post this extract now as it expresses our appreciation of all those who helped us in our recent difficulty.

Hearing things

 

    

    "Listening has been a large part of my craft. [...] Listening in the strict sense of the word means to hear attentively. Yet literature abounds with remarkable things which the writer heard because he was not paying this kind of classroom attention, and by this I do not mean inner voices and the like, but actual sounds, usually sentences, gloatingly acquired. Those speaking these sentences, did they but know that they were being so effortlessly intercepted, could say, 'I am not talking to you!' But as every writer knows at such a moment, they are! - and in riveting tones. His thoughts build up around these syllables which he could have missed had he been listening 'attentively' and his creativity comes into play."

    Ronald Blythe, The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958

Twilight

    "For twilight, the time between times, brings true grey, the colour that exists in its own right. Even the word itself, twilight, carries a gentle and lyrical sound, the time between lights, the greater light of the sun and the lesser light of the moon. Here is the moment of the changing of the guard between these two luminaries. It is a fragile time of transition, half-light and half-dark - it is mysterious, ambiguous. It is the time of uncertainty, given to us daily as a reminder of the reality of the between-time.

    It is an image from which we can learn so much, and it falls to the poet to tell us what this gift can mean. When Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, was asked to turn The Wind in the Willows into a ballet libretto, he discovered an aura of mystery there that finds its way into these lines*, spoken by the actor playing the author Kenneth Grahame as he emerges into the attic and looks around at the audience:

    Here I am, just here. Awake

    But dreaming. In the attic of my home -

    And nothing is quite certain any more.

    Is this grey twilight or the dusty air?

    You see? You can't be sure. And nothing's sure.

    Inside my head. I'm like a ghost that floats

    Between two worlds ..."

 

    Esther de Waal, Living on the Border: Reflections on the Experience of Threshold

 

*See more here.

A postscript to ...

... this post:

    "for Nature's particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking ... is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted ... certainly creative and suprasensitive."

    Kenneth Grahame, quoted by Matthew Dennison in Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame.

Take note

    "Notebooks are beholden to their authors. Their function is limited only by the imagination of their owner."

    "Your notebook greets you each morning with the pure, blank slate of an empty page. It serves as a small reminder that the day is as yet unwritten."

    "Your notebook evolves as you do. You might say that you co-iterate. It will conform to your ever-changing needs. The lovely side effect is that as the years pass, you're creating a record of your choices, and the ensuing experiences."

    Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method: Track your Past, Order your Present, Plan your Future. 

    From Seneca comes the book's epigraph: "Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's account every day ... One who daily puts the finishing touch to his life is never in want of time."

The writer's life

   

 

    "[...] I began to meditate on the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him, and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax-gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man."

    W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale.

Thought for the day

 

    "In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried. The meeting with remembered and well-loved passages is like the continual greeting of old friends; nothing is so warming and companionable."

    Elizabeth Goudge, The Bird in the Tree.

Sanctuary

    "Yet even as he went leaping down the drive [...] Ben was conscious as always of the beauty of the oak-wood, and of the garden that he could see through the iron gateway in the old high red brick wall that was skirted by the drive as it wound from the east side of the house, where the porch and the front door faced across the marshes to the silver line of the Estuary, down through the wood to the gate. But that one glimpse was enough for Ben. In his mind's eye, as he ran on, he could see the green grass paths between the lavender hedges, the purple masses of the Michaelmas daisies with the butterflies sunning their wings upon them, the glowing spires of the golden rod and the flames of the dahlias and petunias, the frail late autumn roses and the ilex tree by the house where the blackbird sang. He could see the colour of it, and smell the damp sweet scent of it, and feel how it lived and breathed within its old brick walls just to give sanctuary to those who needed it."

    From The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge.

Charlotte's web

       

    "It is salutary to discover that her novels, for all their stormy emotionalism, their troubling atmosphere of psycho-drama, their sense of a life lived on the edge of the nerves, are also full of fun, and of a wonderfully sensuous response to landscape, music, painting, and to the small, domestic pleasures of a warm fire, hot tea, the smell of fresh-baked bread."

    Angela Carter on Charlotte Brontë, from Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics.

Quote of the day (2)

   

    "[...] English Passengers is a masterpiece, an achievement of such complexity, ingenuity and sheer narrative power that each time I reread it I am newly surprised: how can a writer have thus conjured up the wildly conflicting attitudes of another time, another place, with such persuasive force?"

    Penelope Lively on Matthew Kneale's superb English Passengers in Slightly Foxed issue 57, Spring 2018.