Castles in the air part 2

Thank you for your thoughts on castles in the air - wonderful daydreams. In the final pages of Good Wives the theme of the sisters' castles in the air concludes.


"And yet your life is different from the one you pictured so long ago. Do you remember our castles in the air?" asked Amy
...
"Yes, I remember; but the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now. I haven't given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I'm sure it will be all the better for such experiences... said Jo
...
"My castle was the realized of all. I asked for splendid things, to be sure, but in my heart I knew I should be satisfied, if I had a little home, and John, and some dear children like these." said Meg.


"My castle is very different to from what I planned, but I would not alter it, though, like Jo, I don't relinquish all my artistic hopes, or confine myself to helping others fulfil their dreams of beauty.

daydream

Perhaps our real life is better than our castles in the air.

The world of imagination

Last week I went to Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood and saw these two great quotes.

"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless." 

Jean Jacques Rousseau

imagination

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." 

Plato

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Jane Eyre

Monday's Sense and Sensibility post was due to reading it for book club. Whilst discussing it we spoke about books that have changed for us as we grow older. We may find a greater depth to them or somehow the sparkle we felt on first reading isn't quite there on the second... That book for me is Jane Eyre. Reading the posts about the Vilette read along brings back memories of loving Jane Eyre so much that I immediately read another of her novels, Vilette. Then Rachel posted about the forth coming film. There was nothing else I could do but find my copy and see if any pages were turned down. This is the only page eighteen year old me turned down.

'Yes,' he replied, 'absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me.
'She shall have nothing to eat: you will starve her,' observed Adele.
'I shall gather manna for her morning and night: the plains and hillsides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adele.'
'She will want to warm herself: what shall she do for fire?'
'Fire rises out of the lunar mountains: when she is cold I will carry her up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater.'
'Oh qu'elle y sera mal - peu comfortable! and her clothes, they will wear out: how can she get new ones?'
Mr Rochester professed to be puzzled. 'Hem!' said he. '...How would a white or pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think? And one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow.' Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre

rainbow
I'm now itching for a re read, before the film comes out in the UK.

Expensive Imagination

birdcage

"You have an expensive imagination. Not many people are going to buy you bird cages." Truman Capote Breakfast at Tiffany's

bird cages

What's your expensive imagination spending money on?

birdcage

And Yet The Books

Today is National Poetry Day and so there had to be a poem....

And Yet the Books

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are," they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

Czeslaw Milosz

@

I don't fully understand this, but that's what I like about poetry.

Happy National Poetry Day.

Mrs Harris Dreams of Paris

The relaunch of this novel and it being Paris in July meant it had to be read and read now. Which passages spoke most to me? Why the dresses and the flowers. So today it's dresses of the imagination.

'One was a bit of heaven in cream, ivory, lace and chiffon, the other an explosion in crimson satin and taffeta, adorned with great red bows and a huge red flower.'

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' There was rhyme or reason for it, she would never wear such a creation, there was no place in her life for one. Her reaction was purely feminine. She saw it and she wanted it dreadfully... She could only stand there entralled, rapt, and enchanted, gazing at the dresses...'

Dior Spring 2007
' She was...engrossed in these living creations of silks and taffetas and chiffons in heart-lifting colours...'

@
'...beauty, perfection, the ultimate in adornment that a woman could desire. Mrs Harris was no less a woman than Lady Dant, or any other. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted a dress from what must be surely the most expensive shop in the world, that of Mr Dior in Paris.'

@
' The more she tried to think of other things the more the Dior dress intruded into her conciousness, and she lay there in the darkness, shivering and craving for it.... she could... imagine it hanging there. The colour and the materials kept changing, sometimes she saw it in gold brocade, at other times in pink or crimson satin, or white with ivory laces. But always it was the most beautiful and expensive thing of its kind.'

Dior Spring 2010

The British Isles

A Bank Holiday quote for today. One of Laura's daydreams in One Fine Day is to take her daughter away for the day to the seaside. To run away from all their responsibilities.
'The cold English sea - she followed it in her imagination, all blue for once to-day, lapping quietly round the coast, sucking the conrete blocks which had been going to play Canute to the invader, drawing a wrinkle of silk over the long sands where pink-toed children ran brandishing starfish by a rough pink ray,

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washing a deeper, more southern purple and indigo round the black rocks of St. Pol, then up the melancholy gull-haunted estuaries and past the ruined castle on the grey point, round the farthest lonely islands with the names like wild poetry,

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running up in gentle wavelets on shingle above which the Regency houses in need of paint turned peeling faces towards the great land mass of Europe, sighing against the chalk cliffs, and finally tying it's girdle around the island's green waist with that knot of shining broad ribbon. Mollie Panter-Downes One Fine Day

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Where's your favourite patch of sea?

Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary

This is my first attempt at a book review. So here goes. Firstly I loved this book. It delighted, surprised and gave me so much more than I thought it would. I chose it because it was the Persephone that interested me most, from the small selection in the local book shop.
I knew I'd like it right from the start. Each chapter begins with a passage and I love books that do that.
One of the main characters is the house, Keepsfield.
'It's more than a mansion - it's Buckingham Palace whitened, and in a better setting.'
Lady Rose is full of love, imagination and excitement. For life. And for Scotland.
'I'm so happy. I'm all little bubbles inside.' Drinking life up.
'My eyes ached with trying to see everything at once and not miss anything.' she writes when visiting London.
But those around her don't share her vitality.
'Enthusiasm is so tiring, Rose, and I'm afraid it may give you wrinkles.' Thankfully she has an aunt who when asked by Rose if it is a bad thing to have an imagination responds.
'A good thing. You enjoy everything so much more. It gives you so many worlds to live in; you skip lightly out of one into another. From star to star; comet-like.'
Lady Rose and her friends are presented in court with their finery and high spirits. Wondering what they're eating. 'Perhaps it is pate of peacock' You just know how sumptious everything must have been. Daydreaming who they may marry. Discussing meeting a man like Mr Darcy...

The story is hinged around three tourists who are visiting Keepsfield. I like them, especially when one says as she's asked to pose for her photograph.
'That background, it doesn't belong to us. Why should we force ourselves into it, just so that we can have some pictures to show our friends at home of our smug little selves in the midst of unsuitable magnificance? I won't do it.'
And that's why Persephone books are great. Suddenly a sentence reaches out and grabs you., right when you're not expecting it.
It's a book of flashbacks that tell the story. And oh how I loved how Time was talked about to wend you back...
'Somewhere hidden away in the dusty portfolio of Time was a picture which fitted here... So old Time seized his book and began turning back the pages, ten, twenty at a time - more than seventy years of yellow leaves.'

It's election day here and this is what I'd scheduled to post, before finishing this novel.
Have you voted? When was the book you're reading written? Would your heroine have been able to vote? Would the authoress have been able to vote? She may have written a book, which had been published but just think. In 1918 women over 30 could vote and it wasn't until 1928 that the Equal Franchise Act meant women and men had the same right. So, Ruby Ferguson, who wrote Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, was at Oxford University but unable to vote. It would have been unthinkable for Lady Rose.
Now I've finished Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary today seems the right day to post my review. Why? For passages like this, from Rose's school friend.
'I mean that we aren't expected to want to live, or to do things, or achieve things. We haven't to have any views or aspirations; and ideas are improper and dangerous. ...If I had my way women should be free to do the same things as men; come and go as they wished, and read and talk, and be doctors and lawyers, and financiers, and Members of Parliament, and newspaper writers. Wouldn't that be wonderful?'
And then later about Lady Rose herself
'She had cried on her bed all the afternoon, realizing bitterly that in 1874 married women had no rights, even if they were countesses.'
These are women with thoughts, imaginations, desires and they're not able to fulfill them. They stay as dreams...
We, or maybe it's just me, start reading these period novels and wish to be Lady Rose, in her vast house, wearing her amazing dresses. However, as her story unravels it brings a shiver down my spine. How could I have wanted her life? The repression? The Rules? Spoken and Unspoken? I want my life. Yes it took time to meet Warmth but we met each other and fell in love, it wasn't arranged for us.

I shall write no more for fear of giving the story away. Our visitors to Keepsfield want more. They think the end of the story is 'vague and disappointing' and are told.
'But in real life things go like that. Our stories have no ending. We come into the light for a little while, and then we move into the shadows and nobody sees us any more.' For us the reader there is more. But do we dare read on? As Ruby Ferguson writes before the final chapter.
'If any reader feels that this is a fitting place to make an end he can conveniently do so. ...A story is not told unless it is told in its entirety; but that is no reason for forcing it whole upon a reader with a literary conscience. You may read no more; but if you must, well, then, you must.'

Thank you Claire and Verity for organising this week.

I've gained so so much from it.

Happy Living our own life. Happy Daydreaming,

Relish and Enjoy our freedom to vote.

Happy Persephone Week to you all

Reading

The oldest Blessing is reading. And is reading well. She's able to say which books she likes and wishes to read again. She read a book to me when we saw her last. I hope it's the first of many. I know that Twin, Nana and I wish her a lifetime of... Enjoyment. Escaping. Thinking. Day Dreaming. Imagining. Learning. And so much more.
'When we first read, we have won our freedom from adults: they no longer control what we learn, what we feel.' J. Jordan Vogue October 1996.

Dearest Blessing - I wish you a library and life time full of books. Check out the chandelier too.

Today Twin sent me a photo of Blessing at the hair dressers reading her first Hello magazine. For isn't that what reading is also all about? Magazines... Blogs....

Where do you write?

Twin always likes it when she's visited where I'm living so she can 'visualise you when we're talking on the telephone.' This made me wonder. Where do you sit and write your blog? I'm reading your thoughts, interests and learning a little about your life. Our minds can't help but conjure up how each other may look as we read written words, just like imagining characters in a novel. For me part of that imagination is the space we occupy when we write. I wonder do you write in the same room, office, home? And within that space is it always the same place? Always at the kitchen table or on the bed? Where would your dream place be to write? source
What would you imagine with this office view?

Would you sit on the sofa or the chair? Imagine a roaring fire in the winter or the windows wide open in the summer, observing the world passing by below..

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Oh to eat, drink, discuss, laugh, cry and write at this table....

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Or do you prefer to write in public places?

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So where dear reader do you write?