“A sense of purpose returned to him: he must wind his watch. He pulled it out. It had stopped. Till that moment, he had been perplexed, or angry, or cut to the heart; but he had not felt intimidated: it had been too storylike for that. Now he fell into the blankness of despair. He was lost, lost! His watch, sole ally of his rational man, had stopped.” –From Foxcastle, in the story collection Kingdom of Elfins, by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

One of the hallmarks of serious crises is the strange shrinking of time horizons, with only occasional tunnels linking to specific points in the past. For the most part the experienced time is blurred, circumscribed by a yesterday, today, tomorrow, and no sense of an extended future. The fear of envisioning scenarios that might not come to pass, if too positive, or are too frightening to contemplate, if negative, locks the mind into the diffuseness of the moment.

The mantra of “a day at a time” is in some ways descriptive then just as much as prescriptive. In this week’s challenge to find positive things I tried to recall how the future, after all, exists, and is often filled with extraordinary surprises. As good an example as anything is the life and work of Sylvia Townsend Warner, a musicologist, poet, novelist and rebel.

Her life itself during the times of the Bloomsbury Circle to the late 1970s when her work was regularly published in The New Yorker, would be material for a novel. She lived with a woman poet, Valentine Ackland, who these days might be considered a transexual, who had multiple extra-relationship affairs, and who she nursed until her death from virulent breast cancer. It was in her 80s that Townsend Warner decided to write a collection of stories far removed from her usual fare, envisioning a kingdom of elves and other mythic creatures, nasty ones as much as anything else. The stories, Kingdom of Elfins (1977), are strange, peculiar, sometimes brutal, and testimony to the will of an artist to transcend boundaries and just do what she damn well pleases, late in life. A vision I cherish for my own future.

Here is an introduction to what she pulled off.

“In Kingdoms, Warner experiments with the excision of affect from the narrative process, producing stories which construct the narrative voice uncompromisingly as a voice of observation rather than identification. The playing field on which this is carried through is nothing less than a whole new fictional universe in the form of meticulously worked-out ‘Elfin’ worlds. The narratives’ observational stance unfolds itself as a disinterested ethnography of the strangeness of behaviours both human and non-human, radically decentring human perceptions and moral convictions in the process.”

Given my preoccupation with the shrinking of time right now, I chose one of her stories, Foxcastle, for us to read. It uses the old fairy tale trope of spending time in a different world, and then re-emerging into your own one, having grown old. (My mirror is my witness, believe me.) It also appealed to me because of the apt description of how the existence in a different time frame, exposed to forces that are unfamiliar in behavior and ways of interacting, also affects other psychological processes (see the quote at the beginning of today’s musings and the descriptions in the story) that previously defined us.

(For those who subscribe to The New Yorker, the full story is here.)

Foxcastle
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Copyright © The Estate of Sylvia Townsend Warner

He could not imagine in what way he had offended them. Ever since he could remember, they had fascinated him. His nurse sang him to sleep with ballads about them; he pursued the hinds and shepherds on his father’s estate for stories of how they danced round the Cranach Loch, of the pebbles aimed by invisible hands that skipped over its surface in games of duck‐and‐drake, of how, on a sudden, they would leave all together, whirring their wings and whistling; how they stole butter from Mungo’s mother’s churn, hated sluttishness, danced rings into the grass; how, wearing mourning scarves, they were seen following the crazy Minister’s bier to the grave; how it was impossible for them to weep, how they must never be mentioned on a Good Friday, how wary one must be not to offend them by pulling as much as a dead bough for fuel from a thorn tree. When he was sent to the University of Aberdeen and could get at books, he read everything he could find on their subject: that they were the scattered remnants of Satan’s host, were a superstition, were the old Picts; and reading the English poets—a fanciful lot—that they slept in cast snake‐skins, drank from acorn‐cup goblets, sat on mushrooms, drove teams of mice. Grounded on ballads and folklore, he discounted most of this, except as evidence substantiating their existence—since to be dismissed as a superstition proves a preliminary belief. Time went on, he took his degree as MA, and was appointed to the Lectureship in Rhetoric. The learned life suited James Sutherland so well that he was careful not to jeopardize his hold on it by mentioning his private opinions. Yet sometimes they broke from him, as when in a Disputation with the Professor of History, a fanatic for the Picts, he found himself being an Apologist for the Kingdom of Elfin—and thereafter was spoken of behind his back as Fairy Sutherland.

During the summer vacation, when many of the scholars went home to help get in the harvest, the Professor of History travelled about in search of Pictish remains—the likeliest sites for them being the so‐called Fairy Knowes, which proved conclusively that fairies were imperfectly remembered Picts. The Lecturer in Rhetoric also travelled about for his own purposes, and was not above examining Pictish remains, in case they afforded a small footprint or a strain of harp music. If, as sometimes happened, the two men met, they conversed on blameless subjects, such as the prevalence of horse‐flies or the clear atmosphere which presages rain; and parted. But in his forty‐ ninth summer James Sutherland had Foxcastle to himself. One might say it came to him as a reward of faith. A visiting Lecturer in Jurisprudence had remarked that, whether or no fairies existed, they influenced leaseholds: the legendary teind to hell which bound fairies to offer a living sacrifice every seven years making many tenants unwilling to begin a seven‐year lease, or a lease of multiple sevens. On the offchance of finding a fairy legally recorded, James Sutherland used to buy bundles of old law papers off the scrivener’s stall in the market. Nothing came of it till the day he saw the name Foxcastle in a disputed ownership of a sheep walk in Peeblesshire. Foxcastle. Folks Castle. The meaning jumped to the eye. It was a long journey to make on foot, but if it had been as far as the Indies he would have made it.

Foxcastle was a hill among other hills, steep‐sided, flattened at the top. If it had been a sheep walk that must be long since, for the heather had taken over, covering the summit and lapping down the sides. It was heather of long‐established growth, standing over knee‐high on thickened stems. As he was forcing his way through it he thought that the Professor of History would be hard put to it to trace any Pictish remains. He was still relishing the thought when he fell into a pit. He had got into a formation of peat hags, which started up from the heather like foes from an ambush. The stagnant water streaking between them reflected the sky with a savage blue. He scrambled out, none the worse except for wet feet and a twisted ankle, and with a sharpened appreciation of the nature of moorland peat: dry as a bone above, wet as corruption below. Walking more cautiously, he skirted the peat hags, and sat down on the western slope to shake the water out of his shoes and rub his ankle. He had never felt so imperially alone. In all the wide expanse around him there was no sign of man. Nothing moved except a few sheep on the opposite hillside and the burn flickering and rattling down the valley between. He watched a hawk flying in wide surveying circles overhead, saw it gather its flight into a poise and strike down on its kill. It was as though this imposed an edict of silence; not a small bird uttered. After a while he saw it lift nonchalantly away.

It was its own hawk. But manned hawks must often rise over Foxcastle. Fairies were known to go hawking, using merlins, he supposed, to bring down larks: a merlin would be proportionate. Angus the shepherd, who had seen a fairy, said it was a head taller than the tallest thistle, portly, and holding itself very stately and erect. So much for sleeping in a snake’s cast weed! But poets always spin nonsense out of reality, piling Pelion on Ossa for a giant, whitening a lady’s hand to new‐fallen snow. There was considerable variance about the Elfin complexion, authentic reports ranging from pallor to gipsy swarthiness. The fairies who came out of a hill in Suffolk were green. Other authorities held that they are invisible to mortal eyes, or only to be seen at dusk, when colours would be muted. Angus had seen his thistle fairy at dusk.

James Sutherland rubbed the ache from his ankle. His shoes were dry. He put them on, but did not get up. There was still a good stretch of the long summer afternoon to run; the sheep on the opposite hillside had not begun to move upward to their sleeping place. With every moment the rich drowsy scent of the heather intensified. He would stay a while longer.

When he woke, it was night. Clouds had gathered, blotting out moon and stars. It was cold, the heather had lost its scent. He Iay unmoving, to husband his warmth. Later, he woke again. It was still mirk night, and so silent that he could hear, as though it were close at hand, the burn in the valley. Lulled by its unresting voice, he fell profoundly asleep.

A fingernail pricked him awake. The heather was gone, the clouded sky was a shadowy stone vault; he Iay on a stone floor, and was bound hand and foot in swathings of cobweb, so elastic that when he moved they yielded, so tough that they would not let go. The fingernail explored the convolutions of his ear, left it, traced the lines on his cheek. Other hands were fingering him, lightly, delicately, adroitly. His shoes were taken off, his toes parted, the soles of his feet prodded. His coat was unbuttoned, his shirt opened. Fingers tweaked the hair in his armpits. The watch was pulled from his fob pocket. He knew they would not stop at that. The cobweb bonds yielded as he writhed and struggled, and each time he thought he had snapped them they tightened again. The explorers waited till he lay exhausted, replaced the watch, and proceeded methodically to his genitals.

Not once had they inflicted the slightest pain, except to his feelings. He did not even know when they left him, only that they were gone. He lay in his cobweb bonds and wept. For these were fairies, these silent invisible tormentors. Throughout his life they had been his dearest preoccupation. He had believed in them, venerated them, championed them. How had he offended them? Why were they so ungrateful?

A bowl of milk and some sponge fingers appeared beside him. ‘Wash your hands first.’ The speaker was invisible. The voice was unmistakably that of a servant of position. He was propelled toward a jet of water which cascaded from a hole in the wall, brimmed a rocky basin, and vanished with a gurgle. He implored the speaker to appear, asked why he was made captive, thanked for the milk. He was speaking to the empty air. The jet of water splashed, gurgled, and went its way. While his back was turned a truss of dry fern had been spread out beside the milk. It smelled of sun and the outer world. The milk, too, was restorative, the sponge fingers so exquisitely light that they melted in his mouth. A sense of purpose returned to him: he must wind his watch. He pulled it out. It had stopped. Till that moment, he had been perplexed, or angry, or cut to the heart; but he had not felt intimidated: it had been too storylike for that. Now he fell into the blankness of despair. He was lost, lost! His watch, sole ally of his rational man, had stopped. He sat with its accustomed weight in his hand and looked at its dead face. An expedient of fear, disguised as common sense, sneaked into his mind. It would be possible to set it going again, its hands adjusted to a conjectural position. The conjecture need not be far out, and in any case he would be sure of a measure of time. With an odd scruple of honour, he buried the dead watch in his pocket.

Presently they came back again—or were back again. He was stripped of his clothes, his wig was pulled off, he was again propelled to the jet of water and washed. The water cascaded over his head and shoulders; soapsuds exploded in his ears and stung his eyes. There must have been half a dozen of them at work on him, hissing as though they were grooming a horse and tut‐tutting at the dirt ingrained on his knees and elbows. When they had washed and dried him they cut his nails, cleanedhis teeth, and handed him his clothes. The clothes smelled rancid; he was averse to putting them on, but did so because he was chilled. He was also very hungry. No food appeared. Instead, there came a new relay of fingerers, who stripped him once more and began to measure him; he felt the tape slipped round him, laid along him. The hope that he was being measured for new clothes was unfounded. He was being measured from motives of biological curiosity: the length of his nose, the span of his nostrils, the girth of each toe, the exact position in relation to spine and thighbone of the mole on his buttock, the dimensions of the callus on his pen finger. They also took his pulse and counted his teeth.

After this, he thought, they will cut me open and anatomize me. But when they had finished their measurements and repeated some in order to be sure of them, they were gone—silently as they had come, silent as they had been throughout their leisurely, meticulous investigation.

Then came a bowl of soup, bread, cheese, and bullace plums. After that—how long after he had no watch to tell him—came nightfall. In the darkness he was woken by the sound of a desperate voice: a shout of despair which had broken from him in a dream, re‐echoing from the vault overhead. He recognized it, and heard it die away.

He had renounced chronometry. It was not so easy to renounce habit. From habit, he continued to pull out his watch and consult its dead face. Each time, he said to himself, ‘I won’t do that again,’ but he went on doing it; for how long he could not have said, but certainly for several months, for the fern they brought him for his bedding had lost any smell of the warm summered earth. He judged by the hollowness of the wind and the lessening of the mysterious daylight, which came and went in the windowless gallery where he lay like the flow and ebb of a tide, that it must be well past Martinmas. By now his absence from the Faculty would have been remarked on, one or another of his pupils accounting for it by saying he had been stolen by the fairies; the hypothesis would have come to the ears of the Professor of History, who would have poured reason on it. Legend supplants reason: in days to come there would be a tradition that a Lecturer in Rhetoric at the University of Aberdeen had been stolen by the fairies—as, indeed, he had been. It was easier to speculate on what was going on in the outer world than on his own circumstances. He saw his food appear (there was never enough of it), he heard the wind blowing, he heard the water splash into the rocky basin with an unchanging voice; he felt himself washed, and saw every fragment of litter, every crumb and cobweb, removed by invisible hands and de facto becoming invisible: his attendants (he had come to think of them as such) had a Presbyterian zealotry for cleanliness. His beard was cultivated daily. He had never thought to have a beard, only beggars and peasants were bearded; he supposed it was let grow as a badge of captivity. It was combed and trimmed, and anointed with oils like Aaron’s. In a moment of curiosity, he pulled out a hair. He was swarthy, but the hair was bright red. He grew attached to his beard; it replaced the mouse or the spiders which ameliorate the lot of ordinary prisoners. But it was reaped off, and after that they kept him clean‐shaven.

At lengthening intervals he was measured, but now a little perfunctorily. Before long they would lose interest, and there would be no more visits. Whatever they had had in mind—entertainment, the pursuit of knowledge, the pleasure of being busied about something—they had intended him no harm, no good. It was impersonal, the traffic of water flowing over a stone. And one day, when they were finished with him, he felt a pat on his shoulder. It intended him no harm, no good—and it almost destroyed him. It was as if he were falling apart with happiness. For the first time, a fairy hand had rested on him with the wastefulness of a caress.

He froze, he burned; he was immortally awake, he was overwhelmingly sleepy; he experienced all the vicissitudes of love simultaneously. Even when he had dwindled down to his ordinary self, his mind had been jolted to a different tilt, and took a different retrospect. If he had offended them and so put himself in their power, they had shown a most moderate resentment, imposing nothing worse than solitude—which he had always preferred to company—and cobweb fetters. They had washed him, fed him, bedded him in a comfortable thickness of fern; their hands had always been gentle. Where was the farm animal who could say that of a mortal master? Why had he wasted all these months in being unappreciative?

He detached his fetters, coiled them up, laid them in a corner, and walked easily to the door. As he expected, it was locked. Remembering his mortal weight he put his shoulder to the door and forced it open. Behind rose a winding stairway, its steps very shallow. He mounted it, rising into gradual warmth and light, hearing the splash and gurgle of water sounding on in its solitude. The stair ended in an anteroom where two fairies were playing beggar‐my‐neighbour, as intently as though crowns and kingdoms depended on it. He stood for a while, watching the fall of the cards; they were the same as any other cards, but smaller and more brightly painted. These were the first fairies he had ever seen. He saw them without surprise or particular elation. The fortune of the game wound and unwound, governed by the chance of a card. The fortune of his game had brought him fairies—but he had always known fairies were in the pack. He walked into the adjoining room. It was a large room, lit and scented with bayberry candles, and an assembly of fairies moved about in it, moving with such small gliding steps that they seemed to melt rather than move. Angus was not far from the mark: taller than a tall thistle, he had said. Well‐grown thistles on the family estate must have reached a good four foot; he could remember them overtopping him when he was a child, and how majestically they fell when his father slashed them. He stationed himself in a recess, to be out of the way, and undisturbed by being noticed.

One is always disconcerted by the ease with which foreigners talk their native tongue. The speech he heard resembled no civilized mortal language; slurred and full of hushed hisses, it was more like some dialect of Gaelic; but though he listened, hoping to catch a word which would put him on the track of what they were talking about, all he knew was that some proposal had been made and accepted. They gathered into a circle, sat down on the floor, and began to sing, softly clapping their hands to mark the measure. It was a wandering melody, a melody of no enterprise, but it must have had some charm for them, and the words, perhaps, some rustic association, for why else should these well‐dressed persons sit in a ring on the floor, like peasants in a hayfield? Or were they rehearsing a masque? He had got the tune by heart and learned nothing of the words when there was a brisk tooting of trumpets. All rose to their feet. In came the trumpeters—two children, bright as parakeets in their gold—laced uniforms. The Queen followed. She was small—not taller than her trumpeters—cat‐faced, and carried a knitting bag on her arm. She acknowledged her court by a ceremonious inattentive curtsy, and beckoned to a fairy who was obviously a person of importance. He hurried forward, bowing deeply, and knelt before her, holding out his hands. She looped a skein of wool over them, wound it into a ball, dropped another curtsy, more of a bob this time, and withdrew, followed by her trumpeters, whose gold‐laced demeanour contrasted with her air of modest simplicity.

He was still smiling over the trumpeters when another music began—a sort of Turkish march, played by two fiddlers and a drummer. By degrees, everyone was dancing: here a minuet, there a reel, there a prancing hornpipe. It seemed they danced as the fancy took them, with little regard to the music, till with a rap on the drum it quickened and commanded them into a circle that gathered and dispersed, gathered and dispersed, faster and faster, whirling by like swallows. He watched till he could watch no more. In the anteroom the match of beggar‐my‐neighbour was still going on. Burrowing into his fern bed he told himself he must remember all this.

He awoke hearing an airy scuffle overhead. His attendants were flying up and down the gallery, contesting for a pair of stockings. It was gratifying to see them at last, though embarrassing to know he had been in the charge of these flippant young persons. He coughed. They descended looking as grave as tombstone cherubim. When he glanced round for his clothes, they held out new ones. The measuring had certainly not been for these. Everything was too large; the shirt pouted, the sad‐green suit would have fitted a Hercules; as for the stockings, they were so inordinately long that they had to be rolled half a dozen times before they could be gartered. He was not a vain man, or luxurious, but he esteemed his legs, and wore silk stockings. These were woollen, and the word that came to his mind was ‘Pictish.’ It struck him that just as the English poets underestimated the size of fairies, fairies over‐estimated the size of mortals. The reflection was philosophic, and soothed him; but not entirely. The theory of pockets had defeated the Foxcastle tailor, so he had to hang his watch on a ribbon round his neck and tuck it into the bosom of his shirt, like a loyal Jacobite locket.

From an outer‐worldly point of view his attendants’ good will was a trifle hail‐fellow. But he was grateful for it. They were fairies, visible and well disposed, who might be useful as teachers of their native tongue; and they had the merit of being reliably available. When he went upstairs into good society it was disconcerting to find himself alone, as he often did.

Accustomed to a methodical social order where time is respected and persons occupy the portion of space where you expect to find them, he reconciled himself to the vagaries of Foxcastle by seeing it as an exemplification of the Fay ce que vouldras of Thélème. What would next be wished and when, and for how long, and by how many was unforeseeable. They were fickle in their loves and hates, fickle and passionate in their pursuits. Some devoted themselves to astronomy. Others practised the French horn. Others educated squirrels. Some, he presumed, made measurements. Only one thing was certain: they never quarrelled. Even in their fickle hates, they hated without malice. Whisking from one pursuit to the next, they never collided. The best comparison he could draw from the outer world was the swarm of mayflies, indivisibly borne aloft, lowering, shifting, veering, like a shaken impermeable gauze veil over the face of a stream.

Somewhere beneath her court the Queen of Foxcastle sat in her private apartments and knitted. Fay ce que vouldras. She was devoted to knitting and never tired of it. When his attendants told him this, and that if she had no more wool at hand she unravelled her work and knitted it up again, he exclaimed ‘Penelope!’ But of course they had never heard of Penelope.

Though by now he had learned enough Elfin to be able to converse in it, and was considering a treatise of Elfin Grammar, he found it difficult to acclimatize himself to a society which had not a vestige of mortal scholarship—except in mathematics: the stargazers astonished him by the dexterity of their calculations, looking at him blankly the while if he spoke of Orion or Cygnus. His previous researches into fairies had not prepared him for this divergence between their values and his. They had a practical knowledge of the world; they also knew it was round; but that was the extent of their knowledge; they knew nothing of its ancient history and celebrated characters and did not care to. They had no more than a loose hearsay acquaintance with their own history, and were satisfied to be without any written record of it, since they attached no importance to what might be learned from a book and were amused by the mortal dependence on pen and paper. It was this that blighted his project of the Elfin Grammar. They were not unfriendly to it, and when he explained the laboriousness of inscribing it on tables of stone (another allusion lost on them) a party of working fairies was dispatched to steal a load of paper, while others compounded ink and collected goose quills. But the Grammar was never written, because the load of paper was stolen from a cooked‐meats shop, and consisted of a manuscript cantata soaked in grease.

It was also disconcerting when a fairy he was talking to became invisible.

But the overruling disconcertingness was to find himself unconcerned. It was as if some mysterious oil had been introduced into the workings of his mind. If a thought irked him, he thought of something else. If a project miscarried, a flooding serenity swept him beyond it. He lived a tranquil truant, dissociated from himself as though by a slight agreeable fever—such a fever as one might catch by smelling a flower. This happy state had begun when he stood watching the game of beggar‐ my‐neighbour, and became aware that the players didn’t notice him, that his large obtrusive mortality made him in some way invisible to them—invisible in that they did not connect with him, felt no obligation to do so. In his former life, he lived in a balancing act between obligations. He had an obligation to do such‐and‐such, he had no obligation to do the other. He performed the obligation; and the best he was likely to get out of it was the thought that it was done with, for the time being. He omitted the non‐obligation; and was lucky to get off without a kick from his conscience. He had never conceived of the total release of not being an obligation himself. Day after day, month after month, went by and not once did he see a fairy’s face clouded with a look of obligation. Whether they conversed with him, praised his pronunciation, said how much better he looked without his wig (it had eventually fallen to pieces); whether they vanished leaving him halfway through a sentence, their motives were pure as the heavens. They had done as they wished.

But why, feeling no obligation toward him, had they plucked him from the heather and added him to their establishment? And why, if he were to be added, did they hide from him, and keep him a prisoner—to make him desolate, then change his desolation to happiness? Such a motive, stern and sentimental, might obtain in Aberdeen, but not under Foxcastle. To be useful? But he was useless. To be informative? At the least breath of information they melted into air. To be a trophy? Of all his speculations, this was the only one he paused at. A despot of the Renaissance, his court swarming with poets and philosophers, experts on Plotinus, sumptuous harlots, bishops, boys, artists and artificers, inventors, assassins, dancers on the tightrope, had fixed his ambitions on owning a giraffe. He had forgotten which despot.

The learning he had brought from the outer world was mouldering from disuse; only legends and trivia like the giraffe remained. What happened to his wig might well be happening to the compartmented order inside his skull. In his blessed condition of being nobody’s obligation he could spend his intellect as he pleased, sometimes thinking, sometimes observing, coming to conclusions and unripping them for the pleasure of knitting a new one from the same material, as the Queen did. It was as though he had always lived at Foxcastle, accepting his good fortune without surprise as the fairies accepted him, and endlessly fascinated by their unaccountableness.

The more he studied them the more baffled he became. It was not that they were mysterious: they were as straightforward as the scent of a rose, as a wasp sting. It was impossible to love them: they were too inconsistent to be loved. It was unavoidable not to be drawn to them. And they defied conjecture by taking themselves for granted. Theologically identified as the scattered remnants of Satan’s host, rationally dismissed as superstition, they were a race of pragmatists. Just as they were content to know next to nothing of their own history because they were living in the present, they took Foxcastle for granted because it was their dwelling place. Yet how was it that living inside a solid, sizable hill he could hear the wind blowing and recognize from what quarter it blew? How could he know day from darkness, with all that bulk of earth between him and the sun? When he questioned his attendants they looked blankly at him, blankly at each other, and said the bayberry candles were regularly lit at sundown. When he asked the leading fiddler, who enjoyed conversation and had never made himself invisible, he was told ‘Rabbit holes.’ And by degrees he gave up the problem, and was grateful for the light that drifted in like a mist and need not be accounted for.

Whenever the fairies trooped off on a raiding excursion into the outer world, he wandered about the halls and corridors of Foxcastle, almost and never quite familiarizing himself with its layout. For instance, he never discovered how the fairies quitted it. Quit it they certainly did, since they came back with spoils. Perhaps they used some watery stair; the hill was veined with springs; some were trapped for the water supply, others only existed as murmuring voices at a distance. When he was left alone, he could hear them quite plainly. But this was only possible when he was alone. The raiders came back, the silence was painted by their gay glittering voices, they were extremely hungry, they had tricked all the mortals they had met. Fingering his watch, that old harmless acquaintance, he sat listening to their brag, and admired the faithful traditionalism with which they recounted exploits well known to him before ever he met a fairy: Mungo’s mother gaping into her churn, the elf bolt spanged off an invisible thumb that knocked the peddler senseless as he made off with his load of thorn‐tree wood, the girl laid on her back in the greenwood. ‘Burd Janet’ was one of the ballads he had fallen asleep to. But Janet’s babe had been fathered by Tam Lin, who was a stolen mortal like himself, and so uneasy lest at the end of his seven years in fairyland he should be picked as the teind to hell that he invoked the girl to lie in wait and snatch him out of the Queen’s retinue. He himself was safe from such a rescue, since no one in the outer world had loved him enough to snatch him back to it.

Falling into dreamless sleep in his bed of fern, waking to the splash and gurgle of the running water, opening his eyes to the brooding dusk of the stone roof it was inconceivable that he had lain there unreconciled and heard his shout of despair re‐echoing from the vault overhead. A fuss about nothing, a midge‐bite madness, a fit of the tantrums. For by the simple act of discarding his fetters and walking up a winding stair he had attained the wish of his heart. Watching these happy beings for whom weeping was impossible, he had become incapable of grief; watching their inconsistencies, he had become incapable of knowing right from wrong; disregarded by them he had become incapable of disappointment. Alone or in their company, listening to music or to silence, he lived in a perpetual present—like the Queen with her knitting, each stitch the stitch of the moment.

It was her custom to appear every evening and knit publicly, as she had done the first time he saw her. He had then supposed that the business of the skein of wool wound off the supporting hands of a kneeling courtier was a formality of etiquette, like his approaching bows and the tooting trumpeters. Afterward he learned that it was a signal mark of favour, and rarely bestowed. Like all etiquettes, it was thought slightly funny and viewed with great respect. On the evening when she beckoned to him he was so far from expecting it that he had to be nudged by a stander‐by before he realized what was happening. Remembering to bow and feeling painfully aware of his disproportionate size, he made the long journey toward her and crouched at her feet, holding out his hands like a suppliant. Out of her knitting bag she drew a ball of wool and two needles. ‘Attend,’ she said. ‘This concerns you. I cast on seven stitches. Two plain, two purl, two plain, one purl. And reverse. One plain, two purl, two plain, two purl. And reverse. Two plain, two purl, two plain…’

She knitted slowly and firmly. Already he saw the rib emerging. ‘And one purl. And break off.’ She bit through the thread. A squadron of flying fairies swooped down, seized hold of him, bore him up and away. He was shoved and squeezed through a twisting crevice into the outer world.

A couple of sheep took fright and galloped off, their hoofs drumming on the shallow turf. The hill had been fired, nothing remained of the heather except a few charred stumps. He would not have known where he was except for the peat hags and the hurrying burn in the valley. He watched the blood congeal on his leg, and his consciousness wandered over his body from one ache to another. The aches were specific; they corresponded with the bruises, the scratches, the punctures of being forced through an exit much too narrow for him. But there was a further ache, an underlying discomfort which corresponded with nothing and existed totally: an ache of weariness, of bodily mistrust.

‘Castellum … a fortified enclosure.’
It was a mortal voice, the voice of a person of culture! He sprang up—and almost fell over. His legs were tottering, he had lost his sense of balance. He had become an old man.

The speaker was quite close. He was dressed in black, he wore a voluminous white neckcloth, he carried a most peculiar hat in a gloved hand. He had spoken to a group of ladies, who were even more oddly dressed than he, wearing white shifts down to the ground. Their waists were under their arms, the shifts fluttered in the wind and showed the shape of their legs. A couple of young men made up the party; they, too, had waists under their arms, and a general resemblance to clothes pegs. But all these were mortals.

He staggered toward them, making noises. He had lived so long with the fairies he had forgotten his native speech; he could only gibber and stammer. When they turned to look at him, he realized that he was in rags and half‐naked. The ladies started back. The young men stepped forward defensively.

‘Do not be alarmed, do not be alarmed! He is merely one of our half‐wits, too common in these days—poor unfortunate creatures, allowed to stray about for their living. But harmless. Our country people call them Innocents. Leave me to deal with him.’

He turned to James Sutherland.

‘Go away, my poor fellow! Here is a guinea, to buy yourself better clothing before the winter finds you out.’

The ladies were making a little collection amongst themselves. Now one came forward with it, her eyes averted.

He stared at her. Words were coming back to him.
‘Take it, take it,’ said the gentleman. ‘Go away, and be grateful.’

(Ref.)

Photographs today are from the fairy woods, music devoted to those little folks as well.

Some steal roses, I, on the other hand, decided to steal the story attached below, which had been unlocked some time back in the Paris Review as part of their weekly effort to help us through these times. Of course, when I came back to re-read it, having loved it during the first round, it had been locked up again. So I found it somewhere else and I think Clarice Lispector, the author, would be quite content to have the word(s) spread, unorthodox as she was.

Here is a wonderful introduction to this great writer by Benjamin Moser, if you have extra time and or/interest to learn about how a Jewish woman born in Russia in the 1920s became one of the most famous novelists in Brazil. If not, the story below will tell you much about her as well.

There are enough inconsistencies in that story, and a weird imbalance between the drawn-out rose part and the hastily added cherries, that it makes you wonder. Rose stems don’t just snap off, you have to pick with scissors in hand, for the most part. Pink roses mostly don’t have velvety petals, like darker red ones do, particularly not if the roses are marled, having several shades pink, as she indicates, although I have never seen one that is crimson at the center. The scintillating thrill, the fear, the daring – all seems allegorical, with the word virginity thrown in as an after thought. Story keeps swirling in my head, then, as good stories do.

In her 40s, Lispector, like Ingeborg Bachman, fell asleep in her bed with a cigarette in hand and spent months in hospital, forever maimed and put in pain from the 3rd degree burns. Unlike Bachman, however, she survived until cancer got her in 1977. Here is a short poem by Bachman that hints at a different relationship with roses.

In the Storm of Roses

(1953)

Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder
of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes,
rumbling at our heels.

I don’t know who the translator was, but the original German poem has a slightly different meaning. It tells of a thunderstorm of roses, during which we turn to the night lit up by thorns, and the thunder of leaves, which used to be so quiet in the bushes, now pursues us.

Im Gewitter der Rosen

(1953)

Wohin wir uns wenden im Gewitter der Rosen,
ist die Nacht von Dornen erhellt, und der Donner
des Laubs, das so leise war in den Büschen,
folgt uns jetzt auf dem Fuß.

Photographs are of roses from my friend’s garden in June(s) gone by, and from neighborhood walks this week. In honor of the most ethereal of flowers I’ll present the most etherial music, MOZART’S PIANO CONCERTO NR. 23, to bring back cheer, thinking of heavenly scent rather than hellish thorns.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

I wouldn’t go as far as Pascal. Can think of plenty of humanity’s problems that stem from exploitative economic systems, racism, tribalism or exposure to pathogens, to name a few. But we are not here today to discuss politics.

We are here to admire what people who are forced to sit alone in a room come up with – or, more specifically, one particular person, bon vivant, military man, writer, painter and museum director Xavier de Maistre.

The guy was a marvel. Born to an aristocratic family in Savoy in the 18th century, brother to one of the more blood-thirsty counter-revolutionary philosophers, Joseph de Maistre, he fled to Piedmont when the revolution threatened his aristocratic neck. There he was at some point punished with 42 days of house arrest as the consequence of a dubious duel.

With just one servant and his dog as company, he spent these weeks in 1790 turning his boredom and frustration into a book: A Journey Around my Room (Voyage autour de ma chambre,) which was published eventually in 1794 at the urging of his brother, the one who thought that mankind would eventually destroy itself by killing each other. Who knows, maybe Joseph could predict the future… then again the servant and the dog played quite a role in Xavier’s book teaching humanity, so maybe there is hope.

The book – pretending that each object or view in his room is comparable to the sights of foreign travel – is satire and moral speculation, thorough observation of detail and far-flung analysis all at once – it is fun, most of all because it drips with the determination of making the best of any given situation, a notion that I currently like to have repeated to me as often and as loudly as possible. And it exhibits how thoughts of this or that, of observables, can lead to thoughts that are only loosely related but somehow connected, after all, veering into more abstract domains – something that always fascinates me, both when I read and when I write. Please confirm, dear Reader!

(Photographs today are consequently a journey around my living room, with select treasures bartered, bought or being given as presents by the wonderful artistic and/or kind people in my life. )

Here is an excerpt from the book (and talking about tangential side lines – the excerpt was located between a letter from an English mummy smuggler, and an 1889 advice manual to lady travelers called Safe Conduct. Laphams Quarterly never disappoints.)

Maistre wrote a few other books, none particularly successful, including Les Prisonniers du Caucase, (“The Prisoners of the Caucasus,” 1825) that included a poem which can be heard in today’s musical selection.

(Of course, there is also renowned harpist Xavier de Maistre, who is musically perhaps a marvel, but also strikes me as a strange bird. He likes being filmed running around in a T-shirt that has Defend Paris and a machine gun printed on it…. here he is playing Haydn who wrote this concerto during the author’s lifetime.)

18th century Maistre lived a colorful life, with many explorations into different fields, acknowledged by his peers, and at home in the country of his choice, Russia, where he died in 1852, aged 88. Should be a plum for any biographer.

Of course, if you don’t want to travel around your own living room, there is always the possibility of books. The best vicarious travel ever.