Take the weather with you

[j4]

Last night it was cold, so cold that my breath hung in the air like words I should never have said. The fog glowed orange under the sodium lights, a falsely cheerful curtain of artificiality drawn over the dark night.

Today the sky is colourless and the streets are wet. Not so cold, but the stillness and greyness is as oppressive as the fog.

Everything feels unreal. "I can connect / Nothing with nothing." My thoughts chase each other round like shadowy figures in the mist, just out of sight, out of reach. In the time it takes me to finish writing a sentence I have forgotten why I started it.

Last night it was cold. I feel the cold more than I used to, these days.

Comments

Warm words

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

It sounds as if you would enjoy Chiang Yee's Silent Traveller books, although he wrote about Oxford, not Cambridge. It's anti-travel writing: the locations are less important than the opportunities they provide for introspection. The author is also very keen on British weather, especially rain and mist and fog, which he reproduces in watercolour.

Re: Warm words

[j4.livejournal.com]

Sounds excellent -- that's the sort of travel writing I'd love to be able to write. After all, what's the point of travelling except to gain better knowledge of yourself? If it were just a question of seeing landscapes and landmarks, you could buy a tourist guide.

Have you read W. G. Sebald's Vertigo? Bizarre combination of travel writing, history, introspection, mundanity, peculiar illustrations ... enough to make a cataloguer shudder.

Re: Warm words

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

<fx: shudder>

The Rings Of Saturn is the same. This lunchtime wimborne and I visited Sir John Soane's Museum (http://www.soane.org/) with its architectural games, Gothic pastiche and massed classical plunder; to add to the confusion small works of modern art are hidden in niches all over the house. I expect Sebald knew and loved the place.

Re: Warm words

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

It's also a dire vision of what will happen if I surrender to the collecting impulse. Only it will be plush huskies instead of Greek urns.