(by fleetsome)
“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” ― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.
(Source: the-healing-nest)
“A Homemade Life” by Daniella.Maria on Flickr.
The Count of Monte Cristo - With covers advertising Monte Cristo Cigars. Alexandre Dumas. New York, Routledge, late 19th century.
A special edition, produced for P. Pohalski and Co., manufacturers of “Monte Cristo” cigars. The covers stamped in gilt with the manufacturers name and with chromolithograph labels affixed, the rear label showing the factory in Pohalski City, Florida, a suburb of Key West, the front label likely taken from the company’s cigar box design.
On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty…
Today is such a day.
I’ve never been able to understand race or prejudice, really. I find it very difficult. It’s like going to a library and saying to the librarian, I’m sorry, I only read books with red covers.
“The fantasy of the secret collector who wants to gloat over his private collection is not common in reality.” The strange mystery of the stolen books of Lambeth Palace.
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.
I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
(Source: likeafieldmouse)
FIVE CLASSIC MISHIMA BOOKS NOW AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME AS eBOOKS!
The dramatic climax of the SEA OF FERTILITY, bringing together the dominant themes of the three previous novels; the decay of Japan’s courtly tradition and samurai ideal, and the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy.
The chronicle of a conspiracy and a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war—an era marked by depression, social change and political violence.
Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers.
Dramatizes the Japanese experience from the eve of World War II through the degradation of the postwar era.
The first novel of Mishima’s landmark tetralogy, The Sea of fertility. Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders — rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new — fiercely loving and hating the exquisite, spirited Ayakura Satoko. He suffers in psychic paralysis until the shock of her engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion, and leads to a love affair that is as doomed as it was inevitable.
She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?
