Georgia Scott > Recent Status Updates

Snow inside. Snow outside. In Bruegel's paintings and out my windows. The perfect way to spend a winter's evening.

"How is it you can all talk so nicely? ... I've been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk."
"Put your hand down, and feel the ground" said the Tiger-lily. "Then you''ll know why."
Alice did so. "It's very hard, She said, "but I don't see what that has to do with it."
"In most gardens," the Tiger-lily said, "they make the beds too soft - so that the flowers are always asleep."

"'Do you hear the snow against the window-panes... How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if someone was kissing the window all over the outside. I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, 'Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.'"

The cover picture of snow was my favorite until I saw The Peasant Wedding. This and other scenes from ordinary life are a joy. I hear the music and see the room whirl. I am heated from dancing and thirsty for drink.

I'm struggling with this. It should be fun but just reminds me of a Tom Cruise action film. One thing after another happens and it's putting me to sleep. I want more. I want to know Alice. And I don't. She's just a child who things happen to.

"'How old are you, my dear? You never would tell me.'
'Twenty-eight,' she answered dully, muffled in the handkerchief.
'That's not a vast age. It's a young age to have gained the whole world and lost your own soul, isn't it? ... Ever since I've known you, you've wanted two things. Ashley and to be rich enough to tell the world to go to hell.'"

Scarlett's only twenty-eight years old at the end!

"[A]s Scarlett looked sadly back, she realized that Melanie had always been there beside her with a sword in her hand, unobtrusive as her own shadow, loving her, fighting for her with blind passionate loyalty, fighting Yankees, fire hunger, poverty, public opinion and even her beloved blood kin."

I just noticed my copy has fifty additional pages. Even accounting for typefaces, the page counts for different editions are all over the place. So...
I am much further ahead despite the crawling pace of my numbers.

This is not the Bruegel I thought I knew. The joy on pages 48 and 49 is worth the price of the book. "Children's Games" was painted in 1560 but is as true today, wherever you find children and they are left to their own devices to have fun. Climbing trees, chasing one another, hitting things with sticks, and - my favorite when a child - spinning around and around until you're dizzy are pictured here.

"A lady, a real lady, could never hold up her head after such a night! But, stronger than shame, was the memory of rapture, of the ecstasy of surrender. For the first time in her life she had felt alive, felt passion as sweeping and primitive as the fear she had known the night she fled Atalanta, as dizzy sweet as the cold hate when she had shot the Yankee. Rhett loved her! At least, he said he loved her .... "

Why do I find reading this so hard? It's meant to be fun, I thought. But increasingly it feels like a dream/nightmare that keeps repeating itself in new versions.

I should be finished but don't want this to end. Immersive isn't enough to describe it. I'm not ready to leave these characters yet

"'If you just let her scream for a night or two -'
'Let her scream!' For a moment Scarlett thought he would hit her. 'Either you are a fool or the most inhuman woman I've ever seen.'"

Scarlett - not the governess in Hollywood's version - locks Bonnie's in a darkened room. Not the first instance of Scarlett's cruelty. On the page, she's a hard one to love.

"'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'"
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where -' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

"As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one."

BAM! It begins against all expectations. Not a short road but a long one, is wished for the reader. These opening lines are genius and full of wisdom.

Instead of Rhett kicking open the bedroom door when Scarlett spurns him, he tells his wife: "Fortunately the world is full of beds - and most of the beds are full of women." Mitchell's novel, more so than the Hollywood version, depicts the deterioration of a marriage through words. Cold and biting. Impossible to forget. Hard to forgive.

"'If I eat one of these cakes,' she thought, 'it's sure to make some change in my size, and, as it can't possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I suppose.'" Would it work with cheesecake? I like that thought.

No, I'm not a slow reader. I'm just reading this over and over again. I hear there's an audio version with Sean Connery reading it. That would distract me too much with the richness of his voice. I once had a professor whose accent lulled me that way. I can't to this day remember a single thing had to say though I was enthralled.

"'I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. 'I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!'"

Drowning in tears. Who hasn't felt this at one time? Not strange at all.

"If it were any other man in the world , I wouldn't care so much - but Rhett Butler! ... I tell you I can't bear it, seeing your fineness coarsened by him, knowing that your beauty and your charm are in the keeping of a man who - . When I think of him touching you, I - ."

He's leading her on, I tell you. Ashley in the book is more to fault than on screen.

"Frequently when she lay drowsily in Rhett's arms with the moonlight streaming over the bed, she thought how perfect life would be it were only Ashley's arms which held her so closely, if it were only Ashley who drew her black hair across his face and wrapped it about his throat."

"[Scarlett], you've been married to a boy and to an old man. And into the bargain I'll bet your mother told you that women must bear 'these things' because of the compensating joys of children. Well, that's all wrong. Why not try marrying a fine young man who has a bad reputation and a way with women. It'll be fun." At last!

"I'm sure your children won't approve of you, Scarlett...[They'll] probably be soft, prissy creatures, as the children of hard-bitten characters usually are. And to make them worse, you, like every other mother, are probably determined that they shall never know the hardships you've known. And that's all wrong. Hardships make or break people. So you'll have to wait for approval from your grandchildren."

"I always felt that women had a hardness and endurance unknown to men, despite the pretty idea taught me in childhood that women are frail, tender, sensitive creatures."

"A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright.... 'Why, why,' her mind stuttered, 'I believe women could manage everything in the world without men's help except having babies...'"

Well, that didn't work. Now what?

"[Scarlett] closed the window and leaned her head against the velvet curtains and looked out across the bleak pasture toward the dark cedars of the burying ground. The moss-green velvet curtains felt prickly and soft beneath her cheek and she rubbed her face against them gratefully, like a cat. And then suddenly she looked at them."

We know what comes next....

"Beloved, I am coming home to you - " Not again! Scarlett opens another letter to Melanie from Ashley.

"[I]t's very bad for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. And it's very bad for a woman not to be afraid of something....that lack of fear has gotten me into a lot of trouble and cost me a lot of happiness.....Scarlett, always save something to fear - even as you save something to love."

I can't let this go yet. Or it won't let me go. I don't know which. The most understated portrait of a marriage, love, and obsession that I've ever read.