Richness on the world
A lovely summer image of blueness infusing the landscape. The hills Lullingford way were blue as a summer sky, a deep promising blue, and there was a richness on the world. Wishing you richness on the world, wherever you are. Source: Mary Webb, Precious Bane...
Intoxicating Ithaca
Golding took several decades to realize his dream of visiting Ithaca, and a few months to make his own odyssean journey there by way of Troy. Many of his descriptions of this and other Greek islands are intoxicating in their brightness and warmth, particularly as one...
Letters of fire in the sky
Balint is the protagonist of a wonderful trilogy chronicling the declining decades of the Hungarian aristocracy in the years leading to the First World War. He is also one of its most thoughtful, endearing characters. Here he ponders a moment beneath a night sky and...
Small boy, large mind
A lyrical description of a boy’s realisation that the world is a tiny pebble compared to the stars he is learning to observe. He swings from an awareness of our insignificence to the fact that he has something vast to commend him: knowledge and understanding....
Of knee-deep snow and sky-deep silence
I found this a lovely echo, above and below; a soft-silencing deep blanket of snow on the ground reverberating in a boundless, soundless sky-deep silence overhead. From the first book in a trilogy by the Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy, covering the life and fate of...
A weight of glory
 Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, and if you don’t, may you in any case enjoy bright stars and their weight of glory. The message of the day is an ancient one: peace on earth and goodwill to all men.’The stars shone so brightly that they made a weight...
Of sleep, sky and an infinite future
From Seethaler’s subtle, sensitive and slender novel on a whole life (you can interpret the title either way).Here he describes the easy sleep of the protagonist, adaptable to many places including the open air. I liked the lack of fretful concern for the...
The high Greek sky
Not the first time I have seen or read of the soaring ‘limitless Greek sky’. It has something vaultingly, deeply, coolingly hyacinthine blue about it, making things seem clean, clear and uncluttered. You can stretch your spirit and limbs lying somewhere...
Vault into the blue
Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi is in some ways a record of a nuannaarpoq-fostering landscape and people, and I see the book as emitting the blindingly clean light of the Greek hyacinth blue sky. And I loved that ‘running leap and vault into the...Yes, sign me up!
