February 27, 2006
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Sudden View
From John O’Hara’s Birthday:
“We stopped at the Trocadero and there was hardly anyone there. We
had Lanson 1926. ‘Drink up, sweet. You gotta go some. How I love
music. Frère Jacques, Cuernavaca, ach du lieber August. All
languages. A walking Berlitz. Berlitz sounds like you with that
champagne, my sweet, or how you’re gonna sound.’”— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, Chapter 11, 1938
“And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
“Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
PARIS,
1922-1939.”— James Joyce, conclusion of Finnegans Wake
“Using illustrative material from religion, myth, and culture, he
starts with the descent of the dove on Jesus and ends with the poetic
ramblings of James Joyce.”— Review of a biography of the Holy Spirit
Monica Potts in today’s New York Times on Sybille Bedford:
“Though her works were not always widely popular, they inspired a deeply
fervent following of committed admirers, starting with her first
published work, A Sudden View, in 1953. Later retitled A Visit to
Don Otavio, it was an account of her journey through Mexico.”… “I addressed him. ‘Is Cuernavaca not below Mexico City?’
‘It is low.’
‘Then what is this?’ Another summit had sprung up above a curve.
‘At your orders, the Three Marias.’
‘What are the Three Marias?’
‘These.’
Later, I learned from Terry that they were
the three peaks by the La Cima Pass which is indeed one of the highest
passes in the Republic; and still later from experience, that before
running down to anywhere in this country one must first run up some six
or seven thousand feet. The descents are more alarming than the
climbs. We hurtled towards Cuernavaca down unparapeted slopes
with the speed and angle, if not the precision, of a scenic railway–
cacti flashed past like telegraph poles, the sun was brilliant, the air
like laughing gas, below an enchanting valley, and the lack of
brakes became part of a general allegro accelerando.”– Sybille Bedford, A Sudden View, Counterpoint Press, Counterpoint edition (April 2003), page 77
“How continually, how startlingly, the landscape changed! Now the
fields were full of stones: there was a row of dead trees. An
abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to
heaven in mute supplication; another planet, he reflected again, a
strange planet where, if you looked a little further, beyond the Tres
Marias, you would find every sort of landscape at once, the Cotswolds,
Windermere, New Hampshire, the meadows of the Eure-et-Loire, even the
grey dunes of Cheshire, even the Sahara, a planet upon which, in the
twinkling of an eye, you could change climates, and, if you cared to
think so, in the crossing of a highway, three civilizations; but
beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or cleansing as it
happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself.”– Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1st Perennial Classics edition (May 1, 2000), page 10
