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2020
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1st January
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,--
Lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene,--one step enough for me.
John Henry Newman, Lead, Kindly Light (1833)
8th January
He said that, by God, D.H. Lawrence was right when had said that there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage? As for Rennet, she accepted him at once and was perfectly happy choosing saucepans.
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
15th January
It's infuriating to think how coming-of-age-novels about the feminine experience are read and dismissed as chick-lit or school-girl books or YA, etc.... As if the female coming -of-age experience is somehow more frivolous or less rending than the male one. And how these works are seldom read as existential novels about girls who want to realize themselves, who want to be artists, and the desire not to have their future decided for them.
Kate Zambreno, Heroines (2012)
22nd January
Dorinda, like so many vital women, had been full of beans as a girl, had then gone into a dreaming sleep for many years, disguised as sex object, mother, hostess, housewife, and had only now resurrected herself. Kate believed in born-again women, and Dorinda was a rare and wonderful example.
Amanda Cross, The Players Come Again (1990)
29th January
Theoretically, Laura was perfectly well aware that her husband loved her, and was solicitous for her welfare, but actually, he said so little about it, and that little so very seldom, that she was apt to receive any demonstration from him in touched astonishment.
EM Delafield, The Way Things Are (1927)
5th February
[W]hen the interdependence of women is perceived as a threat to the dependence of women on men and the childbearing, child-rearing, family-serving, man-serving role assigned to women, it's easy to declare that it simply doesn't exist.... The idea of female independence and interdependence is met with scoffing hatred by both men and women who see themselves as benefitting from male dominance.
Ursula K Le Guin, 'A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters' (November 2010), in No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters (2017)
12th February
I was young. I thought in terms of abstract principle. I hadn't learned that there are times, crucial times, when you find yourself doing in good faith something you have scorned in others on principle. The act sneaks into your life like an infiltrator, confounding, unnerving you: how did it manage to get past the border guards?
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, 'Help', in Face to Face: A Reader in the World (2000)
19th February
[A]ge, I'm afraid, matters. Having been there matters. This is not to dismiss or devalue young people's opinions. None of us understand something they way people who lived it do.... I'm sorry to sound like your gran, but it's just an immutable temporal fact. I was around and you were not. I have been your age, while you have not yet been mine.
Alex Andreou, Schofield coming out revealed a generational gulf in the gay community, 10 February 2020
26th February
[T]he disclosure that heterosexuality is in trouble never fails to arrive freshly as the diagnosis of a particularly contemporary crisis, its signature sex act failing to deliver the reciprocal sexual satisfactions it nevertheless emblematizes.
Annemarie Jagose, Orgasmology (2013)
4th March
Urban woodland is always weird, because you only have to walk a few meters from the street to feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere. There was this sense of being caught between a primal, magical world on one side and a main road through Loughton on the other.
Alexis Hall, Fire and Water (2020)
11th March
I wasn’t really interested in men and I’m still not - I’m not interested in their souls, because very few men have souls. When you find one that has, it’s worth it. Most of them are just so trivial. And if you’re not sexually interested in men, they’re unbearably trivial.
Miriam Margolyes, Interview: 'I like men - I just don't feel groin excitement'. The Guardian, 3 March 2020
18th March
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade;
All things to end are made;
The plague full swift goes by.
Thomas Nashe, In Time of Pestilence (1593)
25th March
‘You cannot be - you that are - young again. You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: There is no 'you' except your life - lived.
Jane Harrison(1850-1928), quoted in Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020)
1st April
No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne, Meditation 17: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)
8th April
These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
AE Housman, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries (1917)
15th April
All of them had supremely good minds, as well as the physiological luck that makes a man able to go on through the seventies into the eighties doing what he has done all his life better and better, even though he may not be able to address himself to new tasks or work continously,
Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason (1949)
22nd April
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains -- but the best is lost.
Edna St Vincent Millay, Dirge Without Music from The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems (1928)
29th April
Shall we blow a bubble, boys, glittering to distend,
Hiding from our trouble, boys, waiting for the end?
When you build on rubble, boys, Nature will append
Double and re-double, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall we make a tale, boys, that things are sure to mend,
Playing bluff and hale, boys, waiting for the end?
It will be born stale, boys, stinking to offend,
Dying ere it fail, boys, waiting for the end.
William Empson, Just a Smack at Auden (1938)
6th May
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.
Louis MacNeice, Bagpipe Music (1938)
13th May
Do they give you the same pleasure to write as they did....I’m afraid they do... I have rather mixed feelings about this. There’s something slightly disgraceful about old folks having fun, when they should, as Russians used to say, be making their souls in preparation for the long funlessness of eternity.
Observer New Review Q&A Michael Frayn, 3 May 2020
20th May
[I]n a pandemic lockdown, when your family has become your social life, the world is literally too small and enclosed for feeling shame about things which aren’t shameful. Weird is not the same as wrong, and we all need to find our joy where we can. If I find mine in a nugget of cold, cheap sausage I think that’s OK.
Jay Rayner, What we need now is friendship and understanding. And a bit of sausage, 16 April 2020
27th May
Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.
Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God's help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.
I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place.
Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.
In the name of God, go!
Oliver Cromwell, 'In the name of God, go!' speech dismissing Rump Parliament , 20 April 1653
3rd June
And Anarchy, the Skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.
For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his ;
His the sceptre, crown, and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.
So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament.
****
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.’
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the occasion of the massacre at Manchester, 1819
10th June
Cities aflame in the summer time, and oh the beat goes on
Eve of destruction, tax deduction,
City inspectors, bill collectors,
Evolution, revolution, gun control, the sound of soul,
Shootin' rockets to the moon, kids growin' up too soon
Politicians say more taxes will solve ev'rything, and the band played on.
Norman Whitfield / Barrett Strong, Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today), 1970: Tina Turner version
17th June
"O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!
"We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
'I know not which I am!'
"The wicked people have annexed
The verses on the good;
A roaring drunkard sports the text
Teetotal Tommy should!
"Where we are huddled none can trace,
And if our names remain,
They pave some path or p-ing place
Where we have never lain!
Thomas Hardy, The Levelled Churchyard, c. 1881
24th June
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Christina Rossetti, Up-Hill, 1861
1st July
[L]earning to tolerate the discomfort of doing things imperfectly becomes a kind of self-improvement project in itself. From this viewpoint, a defining quality of the successful activist (or exerciser, declutterer, or anything else) is precisely that she cultivates the ability to resist demanding perfection of herself - to relish every small accomplishment as vastly preferable to the only real alternative, which is doing nothing at all.
Oliver Burkeman, This column will change your life: Struggling to achieve perfection? This nautical metaphor might help, The Guardian, 26 June 2020
8th July
[H]ere is the single most virulent false categorizing ever invented: the moving art object X from the category of 'serious art' to the category of 'not serious'.
Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)
15th July
And then I read this liberating sentence:
It's really a question of arranging matters so that the dough suits your timetable rather than the other way around.
Why, you could have knocked me over with a pastry brush! This meant that I could mix up the bread in the morning, leave it to rise, and actually go away! I could come home when I wanted, punch the dough down and let it rise all afternoon if I needed to.... The idea that bread baking was something that would accommodate itself to me was downright thrilling.
Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen (1988)
22nd July
Sophia Garfield had a clear mental picture of what the outbreak of war was going to be like. There would be a loud bang, succeeded by inky darkness and a cold wind. Stumbling over heaps of rubble and dead bodies, Sophia would search with industry, but without hope, for her husband, her lover and her dog.... [F]or more than two years now she had been steeling herself to bear with fortitude the hardships, both mental and physical, which must accompany this cataclysm.
However, nothing in life happens as we expect.... There was no loud bang, but Mr Chamberlain said on the wireless what a bitter blow it had been for him, and then did his best to relieve the tension by letting off air-raid sirens
Nancy Mitford, Pigeon Pie (1940)
29th July
A favourite track coming up on shuffle is the roulette ball landing on the correct number - but as if someone else had chosen it for you.
....
[T]urning on shuffle is worth the risk: to hear the opening thrum of a classic that makes the heart beat faster, your smile grow wider and a shiver run down the spine.
Hannah Jane Parkinson, The joy of small things: Take a chance, turn on shuffle: you might hit the jackpot Guardian Weekend, 25 July 2020
| History of Sexuality | Women's History | Stella Browne | Archival matters | Books |
| Interwar Progressives | Science Fiction and Fantasy | Random Links of Interest |
| Victoriana | Quirky Stuff |