1995
Took a long walk this morning – down 7th Avenue to 42nd Street. Such nostalgic air – cool but clear, straight up Manhattan fresh off the Atlantic, having crossed the Sargasso Sea, then accented with all those residual traces of faint fishiness, cinnamon muffins, subway urine, women’s perfumes, bacon, coffee, newsprint.
Brian Eno
14 January
1833 [Washington]
We walked up to the Capitol and went first into the senate, or upper house, because [Daniel] Webster was speaking, whom I especially wished to hear. The room itself is neither large nor lofty; the senators sit in two semi-circular rows, turned towards the President, in comfortable arm-chairs. On the same ground, and literally sitting among the senators, were a whole regiment of ladies, whispering, talking, laughing, and fidgeting. A gallery, level with the floor, and only divided by a low partition from the main room, ran round the apartment: this, too, was filled with pink, and blue, and yellow bonnets; and every now and then, while the business of the house was going on, and Webster speaking, a tremendous bustle, and waving of feathers, and rustling of silks, would be heard, and in came streaming a reinforcement of political beauties, and then would commence a jumping up, a sitting down, a squeezing through, and a howd’ye-doing, and a shaking of hands. The senators would turn round; even Webster would hesitate, as if bothered by the row, and in short, the whole thing was more irregular, and unbusiness-like than any one could have imagined . . .
Fanny Kemble
1935
Today I had a chance to explore the waterfront for the first time. New Orleans, a major world port, has ten miles of wharves and is used by scores of steamship lines and nine railroads. At the Thalia St wharf I watched as bananas from Central America were unloaded from a ship by sweating Negro longshoremen. They are paid 45 cents an hour and get work only about three days a week. As I sat watching the men, a hairy tarantula almost ran up my pant leg. Looking up, I began watching the sea gulls soaring over the river and ships and docks. Seldom have I seen such beauty. The sleek white birds have black-tipped wings and long necks, tuck their orange feet under them, and some glided so near that I saw their sparkling eyes. They are the essence of grace. I wish I were a poet because poetry is the best medium for describing these lovely lofty creatures. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d like to come back as a sea gull. I am curious about them, just as I am curious about everything. Life without curiosity wouldn’t be worth living. Today I remembered the first two lines of a poem:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
Edward Robb Ellis
1938 [Corfu]
We climbed the dizzy barren razorback of Pantocratoras to the monastery from which the whole strait lay bare, lazy and dancing in the cold haze. Lines of dazzling water crept out from Butrinto, and southward, like a beetle on a plate, the Italian steamer jogged its six knots towards Ithaca. Clouds were massing over Albania, but the flat lands of Epirus were frosty bright. In the little cell of the warden monk, whose windows gave directly upon the distant sea, and the vague ruling of waves to the east, we sat at a deal table and accepted the most royal of hospitalities – fresh mountain walnuts and pure water from the highest spring; water that had been carried up on the backs of women in stone jars for several hundred feet.
Lawrence Durrell
1944
Anatole France, in his old age, intended to write a novel, of which the title was to be Les Autels de la peur. The Altars of Fear – could a better title be found for an account of our times?
Iris Origo
15 January
1912
It is wonderful to think that two long marches would land us at the Pole. We left our depôt today with nine days’ provisions, so that it ought to be a certain thing now, and the only appalling possibility the sight of the Norwegian flag forestalling ours. Little Bowers continues his indefatigable efforts to get good sights, and it is wonderful how he works them up in his sleeping-bag in our congested tent. (Minimum for night -27.5º.) Only 27 miles from the Pole. We ought to do it now.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott
1941
Parsimony may be the end of this book. Also shame at my own verbosity, which comes over me when I see the – 20 it is – books shuffled together in my room. Who am I ashamed of? Myself reading them. Then Joyce is dead. Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in type-script to our tea-table at Hogarth House. Roger I think sent her. Would we devote our lives to printing it? The indecent pages looked so incongruous: she was spinsterly, buttoned up. And the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came, and I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But there’s something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature. He was about the place, but I never saw him. Then I remember Tom [T. S. Eliot] in Ottoline’s [Lady Ottoline Morell] room at Garsington saying – it was published then – how could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter. He was, for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic. I bought the blue paper book, and read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, and then again with long lapses of intense boredom. This goes back to a pre-historic world. And now all the gents are furbishing up their opinions, and the books, I suppose, take their place in the long procession.
Virginia Woolf
1943
A group of naughty little boys crept in [to the canteen] and started playing with the table-tennis gear. I went to chase them off, and collided with two little girls about twelve or fourteen. I said, ‘Hallo, my dears, what do you want?’ and got a very evasive answer. I noticed they were very bold-looking little things. It appears that they have haunted the canteen all week, and when Mrs. Diss came, I said, ‘Do you know, I’ve never before seen girls or women hanging round the canteen’ and she answered, ‘No, but we have not had Scotties or Australians before. We were warned of the queer attractions they – and Americans too – have for young girls.’ She had talked firmly and kindly to the two girls, and asked, ‘Whatever would your mother think if she knew?’ She had got a pert but pitiful reply, ‘Oh she wouldn’t say anything – but Dad would thrash me.’ However, it appeared Dad was in the Middle East. The other said her mum was working, and she could not get in the house till seven o’clock when she came in.
When I told Mary, she said that, at Fulwood Barracks in Preston, it was really shocking to see such young girls ‘seeking trouble’. We have seen little of it openly in Barrow, and it set me thinking again of the ‘new world’. I wonder if the ones with such beautiful ideas, who blah so much about what will happen after the war, even dimly realise the stupendous tasks and problems awaiting them, the cosmic swing of change, the end of all things as we know them. I read in the paper of American school-teachers’ problems with unruly adolescents who have never been disciplined.
Nella Last
16 January
1755
This morning about 1 o’clock I had the
