SMALL SHELVES OF INCIDENT

"What was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident." - Colum McCann, Transatlantic

[smallshelvesofincident]

Unsheltered, I live in daylight. And like the wandering bird I rest in thee.

Barbara Kingsolver - Unsheltered

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Man's mind, stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimension.

Oliver Wendall Holmes

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Here is home...an old thread, long tangled comes straight again.

Marjorie Rawlings

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Memory believes before knowing remembers.

William Faulkner, Light In August

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One is always at home in one's past...

Vladimir Nabokov

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There are no days more full than those we go back to.

Colum McCann

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Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Gary Snyder

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The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude

Voltaire

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If I know a song of Africa- of the giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on? Or will the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong hills look out for me?

Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

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The child goes through the full-time mother like a dye through water.

Rachel Cusk

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Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch.

A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be – to be, And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this, And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.

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...gin from a green bottle poured over brilliant cubes each afternoon at five, the ice bursting into applause...

James Salter, The Burning Of Days

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...his new wife, Sally, was young and like a sheaf of silver.

James Salter, The Burning Of Days

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In the end the self is unfinished, it is abandoned because of the death of it's owner. All the exceptional details, confessions, secrets, photographs of loved faces and sometimes more than faces, precious addresses, towns and hotels meant to be visited given the time, stories, sacred images, immortal lines, everything heaped up or gathered because it is beautiful suddenly becomes superfluous, without value, the litter of decades swirls at one's feet.

James Salter, The Burning Of Days

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...was as irreproachable in itself as the stationery of a bank or the presentation of a menu by a headwaiter.

James Salter, The Burning Of Days

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The ground floats by with tidal slowness, the roads desolate, the rivers unmoving

James Salter, The Burning Of Days

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At the same time there is the exultation of knowing that history begins with one's childhood, that everything around you, the buildings,  park, mansions, museums, are all a kind of decor, the background for something far more important: one's own existence. This existence, this starring role, is what the  city in fact is made of- it is the true city, the city of memory and triumph, enduring, indifferent to tears. The derelict hotel on the hillside abandoned long ago or torn down, the weedy tennis courts, the fallen fences, all this has no significance. It foretold nothing and bent not a single strand of one's fate.

James Salter, The Burning of Days