I love to read Chekhov to my cat. She blinks at me always in the most bourgeois sort of way.
My daddy is nice and soft, and my mother always harsh and unrelenting. But well, it is not the first day I have had my family rants, like Lucy ranting in a Peanuts cartoon. It is something which is part of forever.
I cannot bear to be mundane.
I want to run away to an abandoned part of the world and hide away, and have the whole world not looking for me.
My message to you in the meanwhile, Beansprouts:
Those clarities detached us, gave us form,
Made us like architecture. Now no more
Bemused by local mist, our edges blurred,
We knew where we began and ended. There
We were the campanile and the dome,
Alive and separate in that bell-struck air,
Climate whose light reformed our random line,
Edged our intent and sharpened our desire.
Could it be always so: a week of sunlight,
Walks with a guidebook, picking out our way
Through verbs and ruins, yet finding after all
The promised vista, once! – The light has changed
Before we can make it ours. We have no choice:
We are only tourists under that blue sky,
Reading the posters on the station wall:
Come, take a walking-trip through happiness.
There is a mystery that floats between
The tourist and the town. Imagination
Estranges it from her. She need not suffer
Or die here. It is none of her affair,
Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.
Her bargains with disaster have been sealed
In another country. Here she goes untouched,
And this is alienation. Only sometimes
In certain towns she opens certain letters
Forwarded on from bitter origins,
That send her walking, sick and haunted, through
Mysterious and ordinary streets
That are no more than streets to walk and walk –
And then the tourist and the town are one.
To work and suffer is to be at home.
All else is scenery: the Rathaus fountain,
The skaters in the sunset on the lake
At Salzburg, or, emerging after snow,
The singular clear stars at Castellane.
To work and suffer is to come to know
The angles of a room, light in a square,
As convalescents know the face of one
Who has watched beside them. Yours now, every street
The noonday swarm across the bridge, the bells
Bruising the air above the crowded roofs,
The avenue of chestnut-trees, the road
To the post office. Once upon a time
All these for you were fiction. Now, made free
You live among them. Your breath is on this air,
And you are theirs and of their mystery.
– Adrienne Rich
What I desire for at the moment:
A table, out there in winter, freezing cold, with the one I will love, with squirrels that eat scones (with jam), to talk in shivers, to throw the occasional snowball, and just to sit, sit, sit and talk in the snow, to throw each other irreverant glances in the snow, to talk about the sun and Corfu in the snow.
“Maybe you didn’t give him a sufficient amount of tongue kisses.
I promise that that’s not it.
Say how many times per day you kissed each other and I’ll say if it’s enough.
Four hundred.
That’s not enough.”
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and souls’ delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
John Donne (1572-1631)
For those taking the CFA with me and other exams in June…best of luck and here are some gems (taken from the Literary Quotes site):
“What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.”
-William Blake (from the poem “The Price of Experience”)
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky “Crime and Punishment”
‘Chase down your passion like it’s the last bus of the night.’
– Glade Byron Addams
‘Perserverence is the hard work that you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.’
– Newt Gingrich
I will not cease from mental fight…until we have built Jerusalem.
— Wm Blake
And another unrelated quote which I personally love:
“There are such strange things buried down in the unconscious. A lust for power – a lust for cruelty – a savage desire to tear and rend… They are all there, Miss King, all the cruelty and savagery and lust… We shut the door on them and deny them conscious life, but sometimes they are too strong.”
–Appointment with Death, Agatha Christie
I love Agatha Christie. I began reading Christie when I was 7 (it was the most appealing to a primary school child, complete with murderous scorpions, cynanide, British warmen, and the like.) She’s really better than you think, Irving! I still enjoy reading an old Christie every now and then.
“…when one day Rambert told him that he liked waking up at four in the morning of his beloved Paris, the doctor guessed easily enough, basing this on his own experience, that that was his favourite time for conjuring up pictures of the woman from whom he now was parted. This was, indeed, the hour when he could feel surest she was wholly his. Till four in the morning one is seldom doing anything and at that hour, even if the night has been a night of betrayal, one is asleep. Yes, everyone sleeps at that hour, and this is reassuring, since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again.”
– The Plague, Camus
For one of my book exchanges, I gave the girl my old second copy of The Plague by Albert Camus. Albert Camus’s writing is unforgettable, and I was first introduced to him by an old dear friend who had read the same version in french. Camus is the first I think of who is the best in his field for existentialist writing, together with Sartre, and the like. I was depressed for weeks after starting on Camus, but then again, the truth is always quite unpleasant!
Finance paper in three days time – my mind is turning quicker.
And I am notorious for getting trigger-shopping-happy in times of exam stress.
Two of my Singapore blogshops (the new trend of selling self-manufactured pieces online) are Across the Bloody Universe (see: http://www.acrossthebloodyuniverse.com/) and TheScarletRoom (http://www.thescarletroom.com/). The former for my formal pretty moods and the latter for my darker ones.
Two of the newly launched dresses I submitted orders for:
The gorgeous chick-yellow sugar rush bandeau dress (how could I resist) from ATBU… what a clever dress, and I love the effect of the pleats.
Also the Mayflower convertible dress in pistachio green (more your style, Irving)…it is so stunning, and one of the girls even chose it as the main theme bridesmaid dress for the day. My favourite part about the dress is that it can be converted into different styles by different manners of the tying, and the shop even kindly provides how-to-do videos (the changing face of fashion…). I love the fact that they chose satin charmeuse as the fabric…
Terribly tempted to get the one in pink too…(ps:What do you think, Irving?)
I’ve been having the Esbjorn Svensson Trio on repeat, it is seldom that postmodern jazz thrills me, as I am very much a vintage/classic jazz person, but I love the quietness in their pieces. Something I would love to put on on quiet nights, or to accompany me if I am reading Camus.
I almost died finishing the first round of accounting questions for the morning’s mock paper.
And for that, I will have to go back and finish the afternoon’s again.
A little bit of comfort – to wear one of my favourite nail polishes to frolick around the four corners of the room with a cat (scant comfort, but together with light yoghurt, will do in such circumstances).
China Glaze’s ‘For Audrey’, a tiffany blue lacquer shade which I absolutely adore. I followed the white tips manicure tutorial to the dot.
Have I told you, love, about the experience
I used to have before I knew you?
At first it seemed a dream — I’d be in bed —
then I’d realise I was awake, which made it —
it was already frightening — appalling.
A dense, percussive, pulsing hum,
too loud to bear soon as I’d hear it,
it would become a coil of audible matter
tightening over me, so piercing
I was sure I’d tear apart in it.
I’d try to say a word to contradict it,
but its hold on me was absolute,
I was paralyzed; then, my terror
past some limit, I’d try again: this time
I’d cry out aloud, and it would stop.
Trembling, I’d come to myself, as,
the night of your tests, I came shuddering
awake, my fear for you, for both of us,
raging more terribly through me
than that vision of annihilation ever did.
It was like the desolate time before you:
I couldn’t turn to you for reassurance
lest I frighten you, couldn’t embrace you
for fear I’d wake you to your own anxiety,
so, as I had then, I lay helpless, mute.
The results were “negative”; now
I’ll tell you of those hours in which my life,
not touching you but holding you,
not making a sound but crying for you
divided back into the half it is without you.
Penny Sparkle 