"It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember,

that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside--but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond--only a glimpse--and heard a note of unearthly music."

I've just finished reading a book. A wonderful, whisk-you-way-type book.

Growing up, I relished each book in L.M.Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series, both the first time I read them in the fifth grade, and again when I reread them in High School. Needing a romantic, old-fashioned, beautifully written, inspirational escape, I ventured to the library last week and selected a well-loved copy of Emily of New Moon, the first in another series by L.M.Montgomery.

After stealing a few moments to read a few pages despite my other obligations, I had no doubt I would not be disappointed.

"This moment came rarely--went swiftly, leaving her breathless with the inexpressible delight of it. She could never recall it--never summon it--never pretend it; but the wonder of it stayed with her for days. It never came twice with the same thing. To-night the dark boughs against that far-off sky had given it. It had come with a high, wild note of wind in the night, with a shadow wave over a ripe field, with a greybird lighting on her window-sill in a storm, with the singing of "Holy, holy, holy" in church, with a glimpse of the kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark autumn night, with the spirit-like blue of ice palms on a twilit pane, with a felicitous new word when she was writing down a "description" of something. And always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty."

photos: Room with a View by Emily Rachel, book in window from auberginesea.tumblr.com, Emily of New Moon cover by L.M. Montgomery, key from dontwanttoseethesunanymore.tumblr.com, Stars all seem to weep by ~Be-at from deviantart

Light and Love.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

With a Hey Nonny Nonny!

I watched Much Ado About Nothing last night for several reasons.

1. After subjecting myself to the dismal, stomach-wrenching sacrilege of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's go at Taming of the Shrew, I was in desperate need of some deftly handled Bard.

2. Much Ado's clever banter always seems to remind me what I'm looking for.

3. It never fails to lighten my spirits.

From those opening lines, with Emma Thompson perched so perfectly in an olive tree, reading to the picnic on the Tuscan hillside, it gets me.

Sigh no more, ladies.

Sigh no more.

Men were deceivers ever.

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

Then sigh not so, but let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into Hey Nonny Nonny!

With a quick opening scene and a prelude of what's to come, the viewer is then surrendered to the joyous strains of Patrick Doyle's masterful score, which sweeps you down the hillside, back to the villa, infecting your blood with the high spirited anticipation of what's to come.

The best part, however, is the masterful execution of banter between Emma Thompson's Beatrice and Kenneth Branaugh's Benedick. After watching an over-the-top Petruchio who milked the audience in awkward silences that he misinterpreted as interest, and the hectic Katherine who threw tantrums, not shrew storms, on stage, throwing Shakespeare's clever lines back and forth at each other at level 11 with little emotional range and less understanding of what they were saying, it was like manna from heaven to watch Beatrice and Benedick. Thompson and Branaugh deliver lines as though they were modern vernacular, as though these words, and none other, sprang to mind. They don't ride Shakespeare's clever coattails. They breathe his artform like it is air. And they leave me smiling.

Beatrice: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.

Benedick: God keep your ladyship still in that mind, so some gentleman or other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face.

Beatrice: Scratching could not make it worse on't were such a face as yours...

Benedick: When I said I will die a bachelor, I did not think I would live till I were married...

Beatrice: I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest...

Benedick: Thou and I are too wise to love peaceably.

Benedick: Serve God. Love me. And mend.

Benedick: For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion...

Glimmer of...

Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket...

Hello, Darlings.

Lately I've been mediating "day-by-day" with "let's be practical" with "dream big" with "pull a Scarlett" with a considerable dose of

Holly Golightly.

Who are you today?

You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-You-Are? You're chicken. You've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness." You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you're terrified somebody's going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

photo: bottle it up; week 5 by Ashley from vi,sualize.us.com, image from dressdesigndecor.blogspot.com

Thursday! It can't be! It's too gruesome!

Darlings! Guess what I'm reading?

None other than Truman Capote's immortalized novella...

Haven't watched the movie in awhile... I'm waiting to see how different the book is. But I also find myself humming MoonRiver while I amble down Pearl Street. (Henry Mancini, you set the 60's to music...).

Holly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?

Paul: The mean reds? You mean like the blues?

Holly: No. The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long; you're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?

Paul: Sure.

Holly: Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!

Holly: What do you do, anyway?

Paul: I'm a writer, I guess.

Holly: You guess? Don't you know?

Paul: OK, positive statement. Ringing affirmative. I'm a writer.

Holly: It's useful being top banana in the shock department.

Holly: I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead.

Sometimes the world tries to knock it out of you.

But I believe in Music the way that some people believe in Fairy Tales.

August Rush... what a magical movie...

I've been sitting watching life pass from the sidelines.

Been waiting for a dream to seep in through my blinds.

I wonder what might happen if I left this all behind.

Would the wind be at my back?

Could I get you off my mind, this time?

Do you know what music is?

It's God's little reminder that there's something else, besides us,

in this Universe;

Harmonic connection between all living beings, everywhere...

even the stars....

Wizard - You know what's out there? A series of higher tones, arranged by nature, discovered by the laws of physics of the whole universe. It's an overtone, it's an energy, it's a wavelength, and if you're not riding it, good lordy, you'll never hear it.

August - Where do you think it comes from, what I hear?

Wizard - I think it comes from all around you really, I mean, it comes through us... -some of us. It's invisible, but you feel it.

August - So only some of us can hear it.

Wizard - Only some of us are listening.

When the one that you're looking for is nowhere to be found,

And you're backstepping all of your moves trying to figure it out.

You want to give out, You want to give in,

Your head's wrapped around what's around the next bend.

You wish you could find something warm 'cause you're shivering cold.

It's the first thing you see when you open your eyes,

The last thing you say as you're saying goodbye.

Well something inside you is crying and driving you on...

If you hadn't found me, I would have found you.

I would have found you...

You never quit on your music, no matter what happens.

'Cause any time something bad happens to you, it's the one place you can escape to and just let it go.... Nothing bad's gonna happen. You gotta have a little faith.

The music is all around us.

All you have to do is listen.

"Hey. What's all the talent in the blue blazers?"

"It's the Olympic Men's Team. They'll be sailing over on the same boat."

"...Now wasn't that thoughtful of somebody to have all these boys here, just for me."

"Dorothy Shaw, I want you to remember you're supposed to be the chaperone on this trip."

"Now let's get this stright, Gus. The chaperone's job is to see that nobody else has any fun. Nobody chaperones the chaperone. That's why I'm so right for this job."

I'm channelling Jane Russell as Dorothy Shaw this weekend. Don't wait up...

A Room with a View

"She began to talk. Her thoughts darted like sparrows. I couldn't follow everything she said."

- from "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Sara Houghteling

I've been whisked joyfully out of reality for a small bit of time.

...That's not strictly true, but sometimes it feels like it.

Friends of mine have decided to jet across the Atlantic for a tour of the British Isles, and have left me in joyful possession of their mountain-top-bungalow house-keys, the temporary surrogate mother of two silly cats (Stormy and Lola, aka. Grouchy and Sneezy). Together, we aspire to be productive. And also to take catnaps in the sunshine whenever needed.

I enjoy evening views of Boulder Valley, which fades into dusk before lighting up like an earthly Milky Way, sparkling in the nighttime hours. Christine left me with a delicious book to devour during my first week here: Pictures at an Exhibition.

For the Musically Inclined, perhaps the name rings a bell, calling to mind the haunting music of Mussorgsky. Here's a bit of Promenade and Il Vecchio Castello:

The book briefly mentions Mussorgsky and the actual paintings that inspired this composition, but spends more time summoning visions of Manets and Picassos and Wartime Parisians. The irony was that I wrote down favorite quotes in a litte art sketchbook that had accompanied me to many museums. Even as I read about Degas' Little Dancer's provocative stance and innocent face, I wrote quotes in a notebook that held sketches of the very same statue. Books are adventures, aren't they?

"It had ceased to rain, though dampness was in the air, and the plaza and its stones and statues were washed and darkened. The sound of the fountain was joyous. The piles of leaves blown against the trees glistened. The sky cleared, as if a hand had brushed the clouds aside and left only stripes of pink against the blue."

As for me, it's time to be more accountably productive...

"I was a work on paper: weightless, sketchy, all impulse..."

photos: Dear Friend, Dear Sparrow from vi.sualiz.us, Sunset photo and lazy cat by Gloriosity Media: Boulder 2010, Pictures at an Exhibition cover - novel by Sara Houghteling, Olaf Hajek image from Google Images, Acqua 4 by Roberto from Flickr, Sketching Hand (mine!) by Eric Ian of ClarityMedia.

Longing for Shakespeare's Spring.

It's snowing, and the tulips on Pearl street haven't any wool coats to keep them warm.

Being absolutely opposed to venturing outside, I have curled up beneath some down, and will instead take comfort in the dream

of true Spring.

"O, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away."

-The Bard, Two Gentlemen of Verona

I found these images over at Dustjacket Attic. This one puts me in the mind of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and all that wandering about in the gardens, overhearing things.

"If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again! it had a dying fall:

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stelaing and giving odour!

-Twelfth Night

Art History.

Okay. So I'm starting a little project. I'll talk more about it in future posts.

This project involves diving back into the art books of my past.

And I remember, quite vividly, why I love Art History so much.

So much.

Because of quotes that rise out of my mother's college textbook, the 5th edition of Gardner's Art through the Ages, alongside that musty old-book smell (Why I have my mother's textbook in Colorado with me, while the 11th edition that accompanied me through college is in the attic in Atlanta, I have no idea); words from a column that is almost entirely underlined in my mother's precise hand (you can tell she uses a straight-edge in some parts... something that never dawned on me when I was marking up my texts), with her tight cursive making notes above the images, and this paragraph, where she gave up underlining and simply drew a line down the margin and starred it (I do the same thing when I find a whole section of literary gold.)

"Rembrandt found that by manipulating light and shadow in terms of direction intensity, distance and texture of surface, he was able to render the most subtle nuances of character and mood, whether of persons or of whole scenes. Rembrandt discovered for the modern world that differences of light and shade, subtly modulated, can be read as emotional differences.

In the visible world light, dark, and the wide spectrum of values between them have a charge of meaning and feeling sometimes independent of the shapes and figures they modify. The lighted stage and the photographic arts have long accepted this as the first assumption behind all their productions. What Masaccio and Leonardo had begun, the age of Rembrandt completes."

Poor editing and non-commital use of the Oxford comma aside, THAT is a paragraph.

I love how "Gardner" speaks about the artists like he knew them, and sat beside them, and talked with them. In a way, he did. That's what the visual arts are all about. Expression.

Then I came across a quote in my Italian Masters book. You must understand that I adore Raphael. I'm pretty sure I adore him because Professor McNamara of my Renaissance and Baroque art class adored him. She waxed about the leg of the rejected suitor in Marriage of the Virgin for about 5 minutes, and I imbibed every word. I mean, look at that leg. That's just art.

Anyway...the quote, by the poet Pietro Bembo, inscribed above Raphael's sarcophagus in the Pantheon in Rome:

This is that Raphael, by whom in life

our mighty mother nature feared defeat

and in whose death did fear herself to die.

Because, you see, Raphael saw nature for what she was, and he replicated her in a way that characterized the High Renaissance, taking the methods and successes of his predecessors and making them his own in a transcendent fashion.

Okay. I apologize for the Art History lesson. But I hope you like Raphael's red leg as much as I do.

images: Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son (1662) Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin (1504).