BEING MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
The terrapin stare must indeed be a job requisite. Although given the enormous (and also de rigueur) pearls, I suppose that the correct term would be land tortoise.
Don't you dare snatch that tasty lettuce from ME, sir!
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This leads, not ineluctably, to one of my favorite books: Verlyn Klinkenborg's Timothy; or, Notes of An Abject Reptile. The narrator is the Mediterranian tortoise who indeed in the late 18th century lived for 50 years in English gardens, including that of English curate and nature-writer Gilbert White.
Klinkenborg's word-choice throughout is extraordinary: each reinforces the tone, the time, the place. The scrupulous attention to vocabulary, Timothy's elliptical syntax, and the exact observations render it poetical.
I also carry around bits of Timothy's life wisdom. He castigates humans for their "[d]izzying inability to bask or muse." While humans engage in endless bother and toil, all other creatures share a single "[v]ocation of place."
On our fascination with mirrors, Timothy comments:
"And were I to come upon my face as it came upon me, it would look back at me implacable, unvarying. I wear a good round expression suited to all my needs, to every occasion. As do most creatures on this earth. An everyday and Sunday, coronation and burial face. To see it once would be to have seen it for all time.
Not like the molten features these humans wear. They look again and again and never find the same visage twice. Mrs. Henry White stares into her hand-mirror as though it were a fraud upon her intelligence. Always showing her the wrong reflection. A woman older and somehow coarser than she expects to find. Not at all the woman within."
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
Interesting Blog.....I’ll be back to read more
ReplyDeleteThanks: please do!
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