life, memory, time
I love images of bringing the past, at least in its positive manifestations, into the present and future. Nicolson provides us with a couple of fine similes, and I particularly like his earth-digging, tilth-making metaphor. But here now, maybe, there was something...
authenticity, memory
Love what you name. I am moved by people’s attachment to place, to the specifics of a place or landscape, and this is often reflected in the names they give, whether to the place itself, or to its features or flora and fauna – the detailed knowledge that...
discovery, memory, sharing
The Hungarian poet Faludy gives an enticing description of his grandfather, seen through a boy’s eyes. I like how he pitches his speech appropriately for a child, consciously or not. Also the idea that his words sunk into the young mind, and were understood...
happiness, memory, resilience
The Hungarian poet György Faludy had a full dose of adventure in his long life. On the eve of the Second World War he opted to leave his native country rather than get caught up fighting for Hitler. Spending time in France and Morocco before reaching the US and...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment, happiness, innocence, memory, nuannaarpoq
A powerful recall of childhood memories regarding the names of plants, the homes of toads, the awakening of birds and the smell of both seasons and trees. A surprisingly gentle recollection in a book which has plenty of violence. I started learning the names of...
beauty, discovery, enchantment, happiness, memory, moments, nuannaarpoq, sharing
James Rebanks describes a nuannaarpoq moment with his daughter, watching a white owl hunt. And he wishes her all a loving parent could wish a child along with the hope that this magical moment will live on in her memory.    I hope Bea lives for a hundred more years. ...
discovery, freedom, happiness, life, memory, resilience
Ivan is a character, apparently based on Vasily Grossman’s brother-in-law, who survived 30 years in a gulag before being released into ‘normal’ life. He is resilient enough to be able to rediscover the existence of love and kindness, as well as...
discovery, enchantment, inspiration, memory, time
Golding took thirty years to complete his own odyssey from Troy to Ithaka, with war and other events intervening between his first attempt, in which he passed a few miles shy of Ithaka, and the second successful venture in the early 1950s. Here he captures the...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment, happiness, memory, moments
Golding sails from island to island on a land and sea alternating odyssey, and at some point, overwhelmed by enchantment, his memory of moments merge into the map of his travels so he can’t quite recall what happened on which island. But the memories are still...
memory
A surprising interpretation of remembering and forgetting by Stefan Zweig, attributing them to an instinctive filter choosing or discarding what sticks in the memory. It’s particularly touching because the book which features this idea was a huge act of...
memory
I had never realised that this is perhaps an article of faith with me until I read of Nicolson’s belief in place as a repository of memory. I remember stepping into a house beautiful in its architecture, position, layout and furnishings, but so steeped in...
beauty, memory
They are still with us, although we’re far from that beautifully named, white-spumed ‘maned Aegean’. Eke them out, enjoy each and every one and then bask through the winter months in recollection of them…. memories of this pure sunlight, these...
memory, moments, time
I like Esterly’s skillful account of how the vividness of moments scrambles the natural order of past and present in our memories. Vividness can bring the past to the fore and make the present appear like a long-cherished memory even as it happens.This happens...
memory, resilience
In 1946 John Steinbeck, with his friend the photographer Robert Capa, spent a month in the Soviet Union, including the war-ravaged city of Stalingrad. Here Steinbeck describes a touching encounter with a little boy for whom the memory of his lost father was clearly...
life, memory, resilience
Having sent a new year card to a friend, I learned from her partner that she passed away last year. He sent me his in memoriam with a rich array of photos. Exactly as I remembered her, vivacious and luminous, beautiful and strong. The line quoted here seemed a...
enchantment, memory, sleep
Are those legends still alive or did they die with the war, or with the people who told them? And what if we made our own mental – or real – ‘many-legended island’ to walk in? Or created legends for the real world? If you have a memory or idea...
life, memory
A wonderful, playful evocation of youth remembered, in heaps and piles, years, decades and even centuries later. But keep in mind one definition of age; that of ‘accumulated youth’. There, don’t you feel younger already? ‘I was very young in...
life, memory
Memory is a key theme of nuannaarpoq.com, as somehow it came to the surface as a principal element of a life well lived when I was considering what to highlight. Here Mark Twain embellishes the concept with his usual wit and verve.’When I was younger I could...
happiness, innocence, memory, moments, resilience
Arundhati Roy’s heart-rending novel captures moments of intense sweetness, all the more precious for their rarity. Here the two children make of them a scant necklace of joy-beads. ‘Moments like these, the twins treasured and threaded like precious beads...
memory, moments, sharing
This wonderful anecdote by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer describes a beloved uncle who would take him to the bar for a drink. Before leaving, he would randomly select three of his eleven dogs to accompany them. This seems to have been perceived as a treat by...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment, freedom, happiness, innocence, memory
Blue-bells, more even than roses, are the flower I associate with England. There is magic in walking under a woodland canopy among the delicate blue bobbing bells as they carpet the ground for weeks. When I grew up, holidays were spent with my grandmother at her...
authenticity, memory, time
This distinction between individual and collective dreams comes from the book that inspired nuannaarpoq.com. Both types can fuse into our future, making or breaking it in terms of whether it is bright, liveable or simply bleak. Arctic Dreams probes many of the issues...
imagination, memory
I liked this pithy analysis by Vico, which could serve as an exercise in imagination training: take a memory, describe it as a realistically as you can, then alter or imitate it in some form, then give it a new turn by placing it in a relationship to other things....
life, memory
Spending a few days in Ljubljana, we enjoyed a visit to the National Gallery of Slovenia and in particular, an exhibition dedicated to Ivana Kobilca (1861-1926), a Slovenian artist who flourished around the turn of the 20th century. She spent much of her life in...
