“George Orwell once said something about how childhood necessarily creates a false map of the world but it’s the only map we’ve got … and no matter how old we are, at the first sign of trouble, we take off running for those fabulous countries. It’s like that for me.”
Preface to The Middle Place, Kelly Corrigan
It’s official. I am taking Whit’s changing table apart (and posting it on www.freecycle.org). I remember carrying this thing upstairs when I was about 8 months pregnant with Grace, and assembling it myself in the empty nursery.
A passage indeed!
Run, don’t walk. That’s all I have to say. I have just started The Middle Place and already I have tears running down my face.
Kelly is a master. She is like your funnier, more articulate, wiser best friend. She’s also born on August 16th. What else do you need to know?
Found a list on a New York Times blog of the best British writers since 1945 (or some such date). I was frankly surprised to see Philip Larkin at the top of the list. I’ve long loved him, and his peers, in what I think of as a generation of plain-spoken British poets, Auden, Heaney, Larkin.
One of my favorite Larkin passages reminds me very vividly of being a child and being dragged by my father to ADC (another damned cathedral). As much as Hilary and I whined about being taken to church upon church, when I was inside them, I was always moved. The tall windows of stained glass, and the light streaming in, and the hush filled with life.
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.