proud of ma' shelf.

I rearranged the bookcase in my room this summer. I realised that it is very easy to take the books out of the bookcase – to slide them off, to stack them into piles on the floor, to dust the shelves that haven’t seen sunlight for years.



However! Once the books are strewn across your floor, all in a muddle, it is incredibly difficult to know how to put them back in.  



First: it is tricky to start anything that resembles tidying when the books are distracting you by calling out, ‘Helloo! Remember me? Read me!’

Also! there are a lot of tricky genre questions that need answering. Questions like: 'Is the novel Jane Eyre simply: fiction? Or is it classic fiction? Or gothic fiction? Or romantic fiction? And should it go on the shelf beside Pride and Prejudice and Emma? Would Charlotte Brontë be annoyed by this, seeing as how she apparently had such a low opinion of Jane Austen? Would they squabble with each other in the middle of the night making it difficult to get to sleep?'

  

 

And so on. You get the picture.

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Anyway! Here is what they look like now. (Cue the the bright, naturally-lit photographs which emphasise the shelves’ gloriousness in their rearranged state).

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Much better, eh?

go do.

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When I was twelve, I read a book on juggling. I read it in the summer, lying on my stomach in a rectangle of sun. I went over passages of the book again and again, trying to make them stick in my brain. I eventually put the book down and felt ready to begin. I picked up the oranges (stand-in balls). I started playing circus music inside my head. And then... thump, thump, ‘owch’.

...that was not supposed to happen.

I took a moment and then started again. I fetched the oranges. I hummed the circus tune (a little louder this time). And then... ‘owch’, thump, ‘owch’. Juggling, it turned out, was trickier than it looked on the page. I decided to give up and eat the oranges instead.

Thus ended my brief career as a clown.

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I was reminded of this recently, and I think that I probably went about it the wrong way. The way to learn juggling is probably just to juggle. To practice. To physically move your arms: throwing, catching, dropping, picking up, trying again. Learning the theory is part of it, but the real learning is in the doing. It is easy to read the book, but that is not juggling. You can’t call yourself a Juggler if you don’t actually juggle.

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I read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse at the start of the summer. There was a description in it of someone who was ‘so brave in thought’ but ‘so timid in life’. And it struck me. I am someone who would prefer to wait until I really fully absolutely understand the ins and outs of things before I act on them. But I wonder if there is a degree of fearfulness in this. Most things that are worth having require a level of risk – the risk of being embarrassed, hurt, wrong – and risk means dancing with the unknown.  

I've been thinking about this a lot this summer. I've been thinking about  how I can (and do) wax lyrical about "the beauty of love, friendship, faith, [insert other ideal here]" to my heart's content; I can discuss the theories and philosophies behind them; but if I get stuck there, if I do nothing beyond that ...my words are empty. Life will be empty. Life is something that is learned by doing it, by taking risks. I want to live a life that matters, not one that could have.

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Listen to this (Go Do by Jónsi) ...if you want to.

(Pictures from: Leanne Ellis).

subtle.

William Strunk, Jr in The Elements of Style writes this:

'Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.'

I completely agree. I’m trying to get better at this, at chipping away at unnecessary thoughts, words, commas. Writing that is cluttered with too many obscure words and phrases feels a bit self indulgent to me. I think the best writing is hardly noticeable, it honours the ideas it gives form to.

I finished reading The Remains of the Day last week. It is an excellent book, very engaging, and I think it is because Ishiguro writes like this: with quietness. The most powerful moment in the book happens in a single sentence near the end of the story. It is perfect, but I would have missed it – a skipped beat in my heart – if the rest of the novel hadn’t been so muted. Really beautiful.

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(Picture from: here.)

recovery.

Last week, just because I could and because I've meaning to do for a few years, I re-covered one of my favourite books, A City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge. The copy we have (a three-in-one version) used to look like this:

Yikes. I do judge books by their covers. Most people do. It's hard not to. But (yes, yes) the cover can be misleading. I read A City of Bells quite a lot when I was younger, so if I'd payed too much attention to the (hideous) cover, I would probably be a completely different person. One who doesn't like Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, for example ('...Drive my dead thoughts over the universe...') Now it looks like this:

    

It is such a lovely story. Funny, and quaint, and beautiful (especially the parts about the missing poet and the play and the bookshop and the Grandfather and...)  

After covering it, I read the first chapter, planning on popping it back on its shelf... but I then remembered how much I liked it, and it had been so long, and I thought I'd just read it again.   

So I did! 

And it is just as good as I remembered it to be ...even if she does write quite and rather a lot about flowers. 

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