Once More to the Lake

Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag gloating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked...
It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness.

E.B. White - Once More to the Lake, August 1941

Egg Creams

I had the best childhood. I loved life. I thought life was the most wonderful thing ever created. For three cents, you could get a small egg cream—they were called egg creams for some reason, there was never an egg in it. For a nickel, you could get a regular—a Coke glass, a jumbo glass. They put in a spoon of chocolate—Fox’s U-Bet from a jar. Then they would put in a little bit of milk, still from a bottle of milk—it was glass and cold from the icebox. Then they’d hit it from the fountain with a thin, powerful, high stream of seltzer. Shhhhhhhh! It would explode the chocolate syrup in the milk. It was not nonfat milk—it was milk, real milk. And then the soft flow of seltzer to bring it to the top, and a deep, long spoon stirred mightily until there was a beautiful foam top of milk and chocolate bubbles. It was the nectar of the gods. I compare it now to my Château Mouton Rothschild ’82.

Mel Brooks - Childhood in New York, NYMag

Deja petites madeleines

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detatched, with no suggestion of its origin.
I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
Undoubtedly what is this palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, from what period in my past life...
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.


Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann's Way

still good

from ze old country

Arcade Fire -
'Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)', 'Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)'
Funeral, 2004

monet's boat

Giverny, France

fucking

a verb
in cars
like the old days
pushing further
into new subdivisions
that grow
as we grow
dense
and lived in
newly ready
again
like we move
new pavement
pushing further
into our bodies
at the edge
of new streetlight
when we come
back
again
we will have
to drive further
to find
the yet
uninhabited
houses
to fuck against
when the neighborhood
grows
like we grow
newly dense
into our bodies
yet again
at the edge
of new streetlight
to inhabit
a lit city
laid out
underneath us
a verb
we grow
fucking
in cars

a bell

It is so easy to accept, so easy to refuse, when the call is heard, so easy, so easy. But to us, in our windowlessness, in our bloodheat, in our hush, to us who could not hear the wind, nor see the sun, what call could come, from the kind of weather we liked, but a call so faint as to mock acceptance, mock refusal? And it was of course impossible to have any confidence in the meteorological information of our attendants... No, but what is to be wondered at is this, that to us both, disposed to yield, each in his separate soundless unlit warmth, the call should come, and coax us out, as often as it did, as sometimes it did, into the little garden. Yes that we should have ever met, and spoken and listened together, and that my arm should have rested on his arm, and his on mine, and our shoulders ever touched, and our legs moved in and out, together over more or less the same ground... and that leaning forward, breast to breast, we should ever have embraced (oh exceptionally, and of course never on the mouth), that seemed to me, the last time I remembered, strange, strange. For we never left our mansions, never, unless at the call of the kind of weather we liked, Watt never left his for me, I never left mine for him, but leaving them independently at the call of the kind of weather we liked we met, and sometimes conversed, with the utmost of friendliness, and even tenderness, in the little garden.

Beckett - Watt

tonight

in the rain in black boots and a velvet blazer, lipstick and an umbrella, i accidentally walk down fairy-lights-bananajellybean-treestouchinthemiddle-st., of last week's adventures with the dragon boats and sea snake centipedes feeding into the pier and cheers carried straight to the tiny bones of our heightened ear, across above dark water to our open bodies, oh explorer love of mine.
we scale the water rocks, artificial in the harbour, little mountain goats clop cross chipped rocks
to bend at the knees and kiss by the shore.
we gaze cross the dark water. conspiracy.

this street is abandoned, we stand in the intersection. 'in ten years these will be million dollar condos.'

and my bed is full, i am tired and happy j'adore, and you are young and i ignore it -
you turn away from me in sleep.

'this happens every time'
communion, separation.
and our backs touch cold, both want different what the other will give. he will love the whole goddamn world, and i love the world that carries him in it. abdicate, and exile.

the street's changed now, it barely rains. chilled some, i march not dance, the tulips wilt heroically. there, that curb, where we laughed and enjoyed the evening and each other has no memory of our extravagance - it will exist without us evidence-less, thankfully. this street leads me home often.

i shall try and be more like the world, to feel such childish treads more lightly.
i shall try and emulate its self-evidence; wasn't i all before you?
i shall try and coax out its silence; i will become its silence.
i shall retreat back into the world's enduring indifference, and rename the streets as i walk through the new
and even my maps, quick-drawn, forget you in a stride.

"you look like kate winslet from 'eternal sunshine' right now."

"that's the only movie i've ever had to turn off halfway through and could never finish."