These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination... Rabindranath Tagore

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
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On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--from Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Monday, March 22, 2021

Sarum...

SarumSarum by Edward Rutherfurd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Imagine a grand mural in a grand, several-storeyed palace. Imagine that palace has secret chambers, a humble attic or two. And the mural travels from space to space, beginning at the entrance. The mural is a story within many stories, a giant narrative of people and their descendants through time. Their stories spring from Salisbury, medieval Sarum. Watching over the lives of these people is one constant...Salisbury Cathedral. It too grows and changes and grows through time. Edward Rutherfurd's Sarum is a masterpiece, first chronicling one man's emergence from the world's darker place to the Salisbury Plain, then the interaction of many families and their descendants, all the way to World War II encampments. In between, the Black Death, colonisation, markets, cathedral challenges, loves and heartaches, social tensions and visions intercept the flow of many family lives. Here is time on a grand scale, but the intimacy of characters and emotions is not neglected. We feel Jane Shockley's yearning for Jethro Wilson. But that cannot be. They come from different worlds. We feel Jane's stoic dignity in accepting this fate. We feel many stories and we learn so much about the colours and the mores of many times passing. Indeed, this novel is a vivid mural painted with words.

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old worlds

many
old lifetimes

sometimes
the eyes of yesteryear
seem to watch

sadly

on new worlds

and wonder
why
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