Reading Matter

Yesterday I finished Acacia ... wondering what was the future? Would Corin meet some terrible end at the hands of her siblings, would her son/daughter wreak a hideous revenge or might he/she be the best of them all and because of his/her mixed descent be able to pull the world together again? Naw, David's imagination will have a different and more unexpected future awaiting. I saw a lot of references/comparisions to Tolkein and Lewis in the reviews (made some myself), but on finishing Acacia, Part 1, I am left with more of a taste of Dune.

Anyway, yesterday evening, after Mum had gone to bed, I scoured the shelves for something new to read, having now read all the (excess baggage) books I brought back from Colorado last autumn. I took just as many books from Betty's as I could reasonably carry last November, no one else seemed to want very many, so I had a look at them and lighted on On the Edge by Walter de la Mare (short stories published by Faber and Faber in 1930!), partly because it has some nice woodcuts. I almost did not get past the first sentence of Recluse, the first story ... "Which of the world's wiseacres, I wonder, was responsible for the aphorism that 'the best things in life are to be found at its edges'?" (which on reflection covers the antics of several generations and branches of this family). But I persevered and was soon wishing that it was a winter's night, it was dark, the curtains drawn and the stove was blazing. One extract that I would like to share concerns the repast the lost storyteller shares with the recluse in the latter's almost empty house he stumbles upon late in the evening (the housekeeper having gone home and his lifetime secretary having died a week or two previously) in some byway of rural England around 1905.

"Mr Bloom [the recluse] glanced over his shoulder into the corridor behind us. 'He has been a great loss,' he added. 'I miss him. On the other hand,' he added more cheerfully, 'we mustn't allow our personal feelings to interfere with the enjoyment of what I am afraid even at best is a lamentably modest little meal.'
Again Mr Bloom was showing himself incapable of facing facts. It was by no means a modest little meal. Our cold buillon was followed by a pair of spring chickens, the white sauce on their delicate breats adorned in a chaste design with fragments of cucumber, truffle and mushrooms - hapless birds that seemed to have been fattened on cowslips and honeysuckle buds. There was an asparagus salad, so cold to the tongue as to suggest ice; and neighbouring it were old silver dishes of meringues and an amber-coloured wine jelly, thickly clotted with cream. After the sherry champagne was our only wine; and it was solely owing to my abstemiousness that we failed to finish the second bottle."

At this point (around 11pm) I had to rush off to the kitchen and make myself a cheese and pickle roll and pour a glass of milk. I finished that story before sleep and look forward to the next shortly!

He had another lovely line where Mr Bloom points out the portrait of his sister on the wall ... "I glanced up at Miss Bloom; but she was looking in the other direction ..." That's a gem.

Actually, there is a bit of the David in that description and I would not be surprised to see a Mr Bloom, though which province he would hail from I'm not sure, appear in Acacia 2.

Walter de la Mare was a favourite poet of primary teachers in the 40s but I had never seen this Edgar Allan Poe side of him ... great fun ... needs a glass of whisky and some cold leftovers as an accompaniement.