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“It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world’s existence.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight
The Pont de Courbevoie by Georges Seurat, 1886
Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882, London, UK – 28 March 1941, Lewes, Sussex, UK)
Occupation: Novelist, essayist, publisher, critic
Nationality: English
Literary movement: Modernism
Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry, c.1917
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money. I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.
Anna Akhmatova (23 June 1889, Odesa, Ukraine – 5 March 1966, Moscow, Russia)
Occupation: Poet, translator, memoirist
Nationality: Russian/Soviet
Literary movement: Acmeism
Portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Nathan Altman, 1914
I have enough treasures from the past
to last me longer than I need, or want.
You know as well as I . . . malevolent memory
won’t let go of half of them:
a modest church, with its gold cupola
slightly askew; a harsh chorus
of crows; the whistle of a train;
a birch tree haggard in a field
as if it had just been sprung from jail;
a secret midnight conclave
of monumental Bible-oaks;
and a tiny rowboat that comes drifting out
of somebody’s dreams, slowly foundering.
Winter has already loitered here,
lightly powdering these fields,
casting an impenetrable haze
that fills the world as far as the horizon.
I used to think that after we are gone
there’s nothing, simply nothing at all.
Then who’s that wandering by the porch
again and calling us by name?
Whose face is pressed against the frosted pane?
What hand out there is waving like a branch?
By way of reply, in that cobwebbed corner
a sunstruck tatter dances in the mirror.
Walls
by C. P. Cavafy
Without reflection, without mercy, without shame,
they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about.
And now I sit here and consider and despair.
My brain is worn with meditating on my fate:
I had outside so many things to terminate.
Oh! why when they were building did I not beware!
But never a sound of building, never an echo came.
Out of the world, insensibly, they shut me out.
The House with the Cracked Walls by Paul Cezanne, 1892 – 1894
Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.
Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.
From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I’ll sleep beneath its arches.
The Bridge at Courbevoie by Georges Seurat, 1886-1887
I must launch out my boat.
The languid hours pass by on the
shore—Alas for me!
The spring has done its flowering and taken leave.
And now with the burden of faded futile flowers I wait and linger.
The waves have become clamorous, and upon the bank in the shady lane
the yellow leaves flutter and fall.
What emptiness do you gaze upon!
Do you not feel a thrill passing through the air
with the notes of the far-away song
floating from the other shore?
The Mysterious Boat by Odilon Redon, c.1892
“Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.”
— Carl Sandburg
The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen.
The girl with green eyes by Henri Matisse, 1908
Green, how I love you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship upon the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With darkness on her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, green hair,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I love you green.
Beneath the gypsy moon,
things are looking at her
and she cannot look at them.
Green, how I love you green.
Great stars of frost
arrive with the fish of darkness
that opens up the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the mountain, a cat burglar,
bristles its sour cacti.
But who will come? And from where…?
She continues on her balcony
green flesh, green hair,
dreaming of the bitter sea.
“Friend, I want to trade
my horse for your house,
my saddle for your mirror,
my knife for your blanket.
Friend, I come bleeding
from the mountain pass of Cabra.”
“If only I could, young fellow,
this deal would be sealed.
But I am no longer I,
nor is my house now my house.”
“Friend, I wish to die
decently in my bed.
Of steel, if possible.
with sheets of Dutch linen.
Do you not see the wound I bear
from my chest up to my throat?”
“Three hundred dark roses
your white shirt wears.
Your blood oozes and reeks
around your sash.
But I am no longer I,
nor is my house now my house.”
“Let me at least climb up
to the high balconies;
Let me climb up! Let me,
up to the green balconies.
Railings of the moon
through which the water thunders.”
The two friends now climb up
toward the high balconies.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of tears.
On the rooftops were trembling
tiny tin lanterns.
A thousand glass tambourines
were wounding the dawn.
Green, how I love you green,
green wind, green branches.
The two friends climbed up.
The long wind was leaving,
strange taste in the mouth
of bile, of mint, and of basil.
“Friend, where is she? Tell me!
where is your bitter girl?”
“How many times she waited for you!
“How many times would she wait for you;
fresh face, black hair,
on this green balcony!”
Over the face of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swaying,
green flesh, green hair,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moon,
holds her up over the water.
The night became intimate
like a small plaza.
Drunken Civil Guards
were hammering on the door.
Green, how I love you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship upon the sea.
And the horse on the mountain.
Green Sky by Jose Manuel Capuletti
by William Butler Yeats
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet.
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
Flowers turning into the moon by Charles Blackman
Art, Literature & Life 