rssWhatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. - Gandhi
Scrapbook
2010, March 31
Fourteenth Anniversary
Another web anniversary
Paul Klee: Fruits on Red
1930 Watercolor on silk
61.2 x 46.2cm
Today is the fourteenth anniversary of my first Bach website. Though March is going out like a lion, and this painting is about fruit, a more autumnal theme, I like it to celebrate today.
Paul Klee was a professional painter who played violin in an amateur quartet. Many of his paintings have a musical theme or a reference to music.
I hope you like this painting as much as I do.
2008, March 12
All mankind is of one author
From Devotion 17, by John Donne
...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
2005, December 03
Excerpts from Ellis Peters
Winter sets in near Shrewsbury, from Ellis Peters, 1913-1995
Excerpts from Virgin in the Ice
They went out together into the cold and dark of the garden, and felt on their faces the first flakes of the first snow of the season. The air was full of a drifting unease, but the fall was light and fitful here. Further south it set in heavily, borne on a north-westerly wind, dry, fine snow that turned the night into a white, whirling mist, shrouding outlines, burying paths, blown into smooth, breaking waves only to be lifted and hurled again into new shapes. Valleys filled to a treacherous level, hillsides were scoured clean. Wise men stayed within their houses, clapped to shutter and door, and stopped the chinks between the boards, where thin white fingers reached through. The first snow and the first hard frost.
All those four days since the first snow the weather had followed a fixed pattern, with brief sunshine around noon, gathering cloud thereafter, fresh snow falling late in the evening and well into the night, and always iron frost. Around Shrewsbury the snowfalls had been light and powdery, the pattern of white flakes and black soil constantly changing as the wind blew. But as Cadfael rode south the fields grew whiter, the ditches filled. The branches of trees sagged heavily towards the ground under their load, and by mid-afternoon the leaden sky was sagging no less heavily earthwards, in swags of blue-black cloud.
Excerpt from The Confession of Brother Haluin
…December came in with heavy skies and dark, brief days that sagged upon the rooftrees and lay like oppressive hands upon the heart. In the scriptorium there was barely light enough at noon to form the letters, and the colors could not be used with any certainty, since the unrelenting and untimely dusk sapped all their brightness.
The weather-wise had predicted heavy snows, and in midmonth they came, not with blizzard winds, but in a blinding, silent fall that continued for several days and nights, smoothing out every undulation, blanching all color out of the world, burying the sheep in the hills and the hovels in the valleys, smothering all sound, climbing every wall, turning roofs into ranges of white, impassable mountains, and the very air between earth and sky into an opaque, drifting whirlpool of flakes large as lilies. When the fall finally ceased, and the heavy swags of cloud lifted, the Foregate lay half buried, so nearly smoothed out into one white level that there were scarcely any shadows except where the tall buildings of the abbey soared out of the pure pallor, and the eerie, reflected light made day even of night, where only a week before the ominous gloom had made night of day.
2005, November 26
Headache - Shel Silverstein (1930-1999)
What might a headache become?
Having a tree growing up out of me
Is often a worrisome thing.
I'm twisty and thorny and branchy and bare
But wait till you see me in Spring.
Headache, a poem from A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein
WebSites:
Biography
Kid's Site
Banned Hamlet
Memorial
