#fermor

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Live, don't know how long, And die, don't know when; Must go, don't know where; I am astonished I am so cheerful.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water

[blackswaneuroparedux]

A little later, as we talked of the Maniot dirges by which I was obsessed, I was surprised to hear this bloodshot-eyed and barefoot old man say: “Yes, it’s the old iambic tetrameter acalectic.” It was the equivalent of a Cornish fisherman pointing out the difference, in practicality incomprehensible dialect, between the Petrachian and the Spenserian sonnet. It was quite correct. Where on earth had he learnt it? His last bit of information was that, in the old days (that wonderful cupboard!) the Arabs used to come to this coast to dive for the murex.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

The Mani, at the tip of Greece and Europe’s southernmost  promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is  still very much a part of its people’s daily lives.

Patrick Leigh Fermor bridged the  genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an  ancient world living alongside the 20th Century. The book confirmed his reputation as one of the English language’s finest writers of prose. In this delightful book, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on  his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history  and time-honoured lore.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Ever since I could remember, my boredom threshold had been so high that it scarcely existed at all. With the exception of a minute handful of physical and mental types, surroundings and landscapes and atmospheres and orders of conversation, I was unboreable, like an unsinkable battleship . . . My trouble was that practically everything, not only the most disparate, contradictory and mutually exclusive things and people, but many others that everyone else found repellent, painful, unrewarding, and above all tedious, filled me with the same wild fascination.

- Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO, The Broken Road

Paddy Leigh Fermor was the master of a lush and vivid literary idiom that managed to be simultaneously poetic, learned, philosophical, and mundane, a unique writing style his friend, fellow expatriate, and fellow-philhellene Lawrence Durrell called a “truffled style and dense plumage.”

Partly because so much of The Broken Road is taken directly from Paddy Leigh Fermor's contemporary diaries and notes, it may well be the most revealing volume of his many writings, and perhaps the most personal. It is certainly the most introspective. His other travelling tomes are rollicking and detailed, and the pace hardly lets up. In The Broken Road Leigh Fermor slows down occasionally to reflect, and his meditations on himself are quite revealing, because they are honest and straightforward and unfiltered by expectations or excessive editing.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Trivial things light fuses in the memory.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I had begun to grasp, in the past few weeks, one of the great and uncovenanted delights of Greece; a pre-coming of age present in my case: a direct and immediate link, friendly and equal on either side, between human beings, something which melts barriers of hierarchy and background and money and, except for a few tribal and historic feuds, politics and nationality as well... Existence, these glances say, is a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit and enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor  

[allplaideverything]

things were read (#314): The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor

[allplaideverything]

things were read (#289): In Tearing Haste by Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor

Evie Waugh has done a good joke on me (& probably others). His new book arrived, all wrapped in bits of other books as they do, & I thought how nice & felt rather superior, NOT BEING A GREAT READER, to get the damned thing straight from the horse's mouth as it were, so I undid it & read something like 'To Darling Debo, in the certainty that not one word of this will offend your Protestant persuasion'. Naturally I didn't look any further, but Emma and my Wife who were sitting there bagged it & started to turn the pages which were ALL BLANK, just lovely sheets of paper with gold edges & never a word on one of them. That's the sort of book which suits me down to the ground. Good Old Evie. (p60.)

[markwunderlich]

Part of my summer Mitteleuropa reading stack. #StefanGeorge #VonRezzori #Handke #Rilke #Fermor #Walser #Magris (at Catskill, New York)