Teresa > Recent Status Updates

Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young. Sometimes very young children can look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It's because neither are human to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.

From Jonathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies:

But at the same time that you are casting scientific net over the wild world, the birds are luring you deeper into the woods or the meadow or the swamp. The library world and the wild, nonverbal world meet in the middle when you are birdwatching. We need both sides of this experience to feel whole, being half wild ourselves. Birdwatching is all about the balance.

From John Burroughs' WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN: I would not exchange the quiet surprise and pleasure I feel, as on rounding some point ...in the stream, two...ducks spring suddenly out from some little cove...and...launch into the air and...gain the free spaces above the treetops, for the satisfaction of the gunner...He has only a dead duck...while I have a live duck with whistling wings cleaving the air northward...

Kenneth Burke...suggested that readers [of We Have Always Lived in the Castle track Jackson's use of the words "black" and "wood": "In watching how they tie things up, you will discover for yourself the astounding kind of complexity implicit in the...book's apparent simplicity."

He [Pat Covici, Jackson's editor] especially admired her unusual skill at fine-tuning her own work. "What a relief it is to get a manuscript that is not only the product of a first-rate imagination but has also gone through the fires of criticism," he told her early on [in her process of writing We Have Always Lived in the Castle]

Jackson was mentioned often in articles about promising young authors, including a piece by Cowley in The New Republic in which he included her in a group of emerging writers along with Bellow, Stafford, Capote, and Eudora Welty.

Many [birds] I cannot name; but I do not very particularly seek information. (You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness--perhaps ignorance, credulity--helps your enjoyment of these things...I repeat it--don't want to know too exactly, or the reasons why...)

from 'Birds--and a Caution' by Walt Whitman

New Westport friends included...Salinger, who would come over to play catch with Laurence [Jackson's oldest child] on the front lawn.

"The Lottery"...was anthologized...in...55 Short Stories from the New Yorker (1949), a volume celebrating the magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary. Vladimir Nabokov marked the table of contents in his copy with a grade for every story: "The Lottery" was one of only two that he deemed worthy of an A. (He gave an A+ to "Colette," his own story in the volume...)

The Clemenses had held a Dickens day for Charles Dickens Jr., his wife, and daughter (they had six other children at home), had a "tea" for them, and a dinner. Everyone wore Dickens outfits except Mr. Dickens.

"Well, we make up for it in other ways," said Mrs. Franklin. "If the men name the towns, the women name the children; I have known mothers to produce simply from their own imaginations such titles as Merilla, and Idelusia, for their daughters. I once knew a girl who had even been baptized Damask Rose."

"Woman will never be the equal of man until she has grasped the conception that the position of her pockets should be unchangeable," Maud went on.

"The Muses," read Ruth again, aloud. "Cally-ope," she went on, giving the word Chase's pronunciation. "And Terp-si-core." She made this name rhyme with "more." Then, standing beside her new acquaintance, she glared at the remainder of the party, defiantly

I guess the Franklins of Asheville would mock us New Orleanians as being as common as Chase as this is how we pronounce our streets named after these muses!

years when I should have been writing, my hands & being were at other (inescapable) tasks.Now, lightened as they are...I pay a psychic cost...habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken...response to others...responsibility for daily matters—stay with you,mark you,become you...what should take weeks,takes me sometimes months to write;what should take months, takes years.

'My dear Mr Clennam,’ returned Ferdinand, laughing, ‘have you really such a verdant hope? The next man who has as large a capacity and as genuine a taste for swindling, will succeed as well. Pardon me, but I think you really have no idea how the human bees will swarm to the beating of any old tin kettle; in that fact lies the complete manual of governing them.'

Young John Chivery speaking:

'...I mistaken on a point that, even at the present moment, makes me take out my pocket– handkercher like a great girl, as people say: though I am sure I don’t know why a great girl should be a term of reproach, for every rightly constituted male mind loves ’em great and small. Don’t tell me so, don’t tell me so!’

He's such a great character.

...it pleased her to scrutinise this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where she was endowed with the supreme power.

Helen, engaged with Mr. Dalloway and the habit, now fallen into decline, of quoting Greek in the House of Commons, noted, in the great commonplace book that lies open beside us as we talk, the fact that all men, even me like Ridley, really prefer women to be fashionable.

"I recall that the first big impression literature made on me while I was reading a novel was an erotic impression....So that was what literature was all about - making extraordinary discoveries which one couldn't refer to out loud but which it was accepted could resonate silently in one's head, like those words which I read and reread and read again, hoping that all at once I would understand what they meant..."

Whereas his colleagues wondered about the parsimonious existence he led and considered his everyday routine to be grey and monotonous, Francois Le Grix was able to cast himself as the hero of his own life story - an ability that brings happiness to all who possess it.

That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not just know when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind...

As they went along, certainly one of the party, and probably more than one, thought that Bleeding Heart Yard was no inappropriate destination for a man who had been in official correspondence with my lords and the Barnacles -- and perhaps had a misgiving, also, that Britannia herself might come to look for lodgings in Bleeding Heart Yard, some ugly day or other, if she overdid the Circumlocution Office.

He had a certain air of being a handsome man--which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man--which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.

"...Three-quarters of the incongruous marriages one sees were made when the husband was very young. It is not the wife's fault; at the time of the marriage she is generally the superior, the generous one; the benefit is conferred by her. But—she does not advance, and he does."

From 'In Venice':

...a canal narrow, dark, and still, that worked away silently all day and all night at its life-long task of undermining the ponderous walls on each side; gaining perhaps a half-inch in a century, together with the lighter achievement of eating out the painted wooden columns...

From 'A Christmas Party': The Consul, a man of fifty-seven, spoke only the language of his native place—Rochester, New York. That he could not understand the speech (gibberish, he called it) of the people with whom he was supposed to hold official relations did not disturb him; he thought it patriotic not to understand.

He...then began to take up, one by one, the old threads of his Roman life—such, at least, as remained unbroken. He found a good many. Threads do not break in Rome. He had once said himself that the air was so soft and historic that nothing broke there—not even hearts. But this was only one of his little speeches. In reality he did not believe much in the breaking of hearts; he had seen them stretch so!

From 'The Street of the Hyacinth':

One or two persons, who noticed her on the voyage over, said to themselves, "If that girl had more color, and if she was graceful, and if she was a little more womanly—that is, if she would not look at everything in such a direct, calm, impartial, impersonal sort of way—she would be almost pretty."

"He seems to be a modern Chevalier Bayard, doesn't he?" said good-natured Mark Ferguson.

"He's modern, but no Bayard. He's a modern and a model pioneer—"

"Pioneers! oh, pioneers!" murmured Gordon-Gray, half chanting it.

None of the Americans recognized his quotation.

From 'A Pink Villa': "...I suppose it is because you have had no daughters to consider.

"Daughters?—I should think not!" was Dallas's mental exclamation. Fanny, then, with all her sense, was going to make that same old mistake of supposing that a bachelor of thirty-seven and a mother of thirty-seven were of the same age.