Peter France (1) (1935–)

POINTS OF INTEREST
• It was a rich, romantic mixture and some of the results can appear fairly ridiculous to a later age.
• There is in your secret refrain a foreboding of all you destroy, a cursing of sacred commandments and a profanation of joy. In your hidden memories there are fatal tidings of doom, a curse on sacred traditions; a desecration of happiness.
• Your groans call me insistently, call me and speed me to the grave.
• As ocean holds the earth in its embrace, so earthly life is ringed about by dreams; the night comes on – and at its sonorous shores the element begins to beat. We hear its voice, exhorting us and calling … the magic boat is stirring by the quay; the rising flood-tide bears us seaward swiftly on the dark waves’ immensity. The heavenly vault, burning with starry light, mysteriously stares skyward from below – and we sail on, surrounded on all sides by the abyss’s fiery glow.
• Forgive his moods – was the momentum bitterness that made him write? He was wholly on the side of freedom, he was wholly on the side of light!
• And the dark empty house leans crazily, where once the clash of cups and festive voices met the dull endless moan of oppressed suffering, and only that one man who crushed the rest had liberty to breathe and act and live.
• As if jealous of the lonely magus’s vision of the Dawn Radiance, someone suddenly breaks the golden thread of flowering miracles; the blade of the translucent sword is dimmed and is no longer felt in the heart. The worlds, which were formerly shot through with golden light, lose their purple hue; as if through a broken dam, a universal lilac-blue twilight burst in to the heartrending accompaniment of violins and refrains like gipsy songs. If I were painting a picture I should convey the experience of the moment this way: in the lilac twilight of the vast world rocks a huge white catafalque and on it lies a dead doll with a face vaguely resembling what was once glimpsed among the roses of heaven.
• The man who experiences all this is no longer alone; he is full of many demons (otherwise known as ‘doubles’) which the caprices of his evil creature will form into ever-changing groups of conspirators. At every moment, with the help of these conspirators, he hides some part of his soul from himself. Thanks to his net of deceit - which is all the more skillful, the more enchanting is the surrounding lilac twilight - he manages to make of each of the demons a weapon for himself, to bind with a pact each of the doubles; they all roam through the lilac worlds and, obedient to his will, fetch the most precious things – all that he desires: one brings the thundercloud, a second the sighing of the sea, a third the amethyst, a fourth the sacred beetle, the winged eye. All this their master throws into the cauldron of his artistic creation and at least, with the help of enchantments, he attains – for his amazement and amusement – the unknown object of his searched – a beautiful doll.
• Life somewhere must be simple and the light warm, transparent, happy. But we live ceremoniously, in pain observing bitter rituals of meeting, when sudden gusts of unreflecting wind break off our scarcely uttered greetings.
• I have forgotten the word I wanted to say. The blind swallow will return to the hall of shades on clipped wings to sport with the transparent ones. In unconsciousness the night song is sung.
• Bold in your speech, simple on your ways, you live generously, hoarding no beauty. An evil man will drown you, alas, in a spoonful of water. And with a stroke of thunder appears black upon black – the ace. A sheaf of transfixing light. A laugh like a tambourine. You and I need to... (shudder.) are we going to be brave?
• There is something in poetry which is more important than its meaning – the way it sounds.
• When then swims in upon my slumbering mind. What doesn’t enter then my slumbering mind.
• He quickly became involved in revolutionary politics and was given an eleven-month spell of solitary imprisonment while still in his teens.… (más)

I don’t often read non-fiction, but Matthew bought this for L for Christmas, so I thought it’d be a good idea to read it. And we’d done lots of greek plays in Bardcamp, and I thought it might be handy to have a nice consolidatory easy popular history book to give me a bit of a grounding.

It’s dated a little bit (particularly the sections on women and homosexuality), but it’s clear and readable and engaging. I learnt a bit more about the Greeks, which I guess was the point of reading it.… (más)