%2B(1).jpg)
 | |
| Beautiful Woman / Tompkins Square / New York 2012 / Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas |
| Stop counting other people’s money. You’re pulling from the discards. We had to liquidate your holdings to ensure your future comfort. It’s someone else’s child. It changed. We are ideal candidates. We’re not related by blood and you love me. Astronauts love golf. You know, I’ve been dreaming about a suitcase. Everything’s perfect. We’re supposed to keep it dim, I don’t know why. Ice blue, white top. Don’t pretend like it’s not scary. We’ve tried. I’m not allowed to talk about it. It’s a convention. This was all supposed to be ours. The smell. Time to put something else in that mouth. People do that. Do I have to go around and write my name on all the things I want? We were halfway to the hospital before I noticed I was in my nightie. The doctors say it’s not serious. |
 |
| Alexander Pushkin |
He was exiled to southern Russia just before his 21st birthday for verse written against despotism. Those poems were found among the papers of many of the Decembrists. The failure of their rebellion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825 led to executions that haunted Pushkin all his life. When Nicholas summoned him to inquire into his loyalties, Pushkin declared that, had he been in St Petersburg, he would have been on Senate Square with his friends. Nicholas appeared impressed by his frankness and allowed him back to the capital, but appointed Count Benkendorff to keep an eye on what he was writing. In Soviet times, poets who were censored or silenced found Pushkin an inspiration. Anna Akhmatova revered him.
Pushkin chose a cold young beauty for a wife. Natalya loved balls at court, where she was surrounded by admirers and wore expensive dresses Pushkin could not afford. He longed to retreat to his country estate, but the tsar would not allow him to remove Natalya from court. After receiving letters accusing him of being a cuckold, Pushkin felt obliged to fight a duel to defend his wife's honour. He lost his life in it at the age of 37.
 |
| Edward Thomas, circa 1912. Photograph: EO Hoppe |
Saturday 4 December 2010
I
Like other Romantics, Thomas got his poems most characteristically by walking. He was a man who walked away solitary into the wind and the rain when anxiety and the black melancholy were upon him; or who might tramp by your side, mile after mile, companionable, and never say a word; or be with you, as he was with Robert Frost, talking, listening, pausing at a gate, a gap, a stile, and so in the rhythm of a long walk and in the attentive to and fro of a conversation you would come nearer and nearer, both of you, to some important understanding.
At the heart of writing, it is always a matter of truth or lies, and anyone in that vocation wants companions, living and dead, who, when you glance their way inquiringly, will warn you by a look if you are edging away from the truth into the many ways of telling lies. Thomas has been one such kind and implacable friend to me. Having his own true tone of voice, he acts like a tuning fork in the ceaseless effort to hit and hold your own.
The dead move and change as the living do. You may think you know them through and through but then, after a lapse of time (in which you have aged), they startle you again. Just the other day, out of context, on a card, not in a book, these lines filled me with a new rush of gratitude: "A house that shall love me as I love it, / Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash trees / That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches / Shall often visit and make love in and flit . . ."
 |
| Florecita quiteña Quito, 2011 Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas |
 |
| Scarlett Johansson |
