These are a few of my favourite things
Hubby and I were watching The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, and I got all nostalgic when Rose leaves for Paris. All the cafes and bistros, and visiting the Rodin Museum. Esp. the Rodin Museum, my favourite part of Paris save for the food.
Except the tragic last night when we had Italian food in Paris. Not advised.
One of my favourite poems from undergrad. One of the few I still have memorized.
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1880
Possibly the most perfect closing paragraphs of any novel, ever. Graeme & I bonded over 30 years ago over a shared love of this book and these words. (And Billy Bragg.)
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I though of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925