Computers are so predictable! I sent you the same Valentine card you sent to your mother. The only consolation with these machines is that through e-mail we are geared to writing letters again, something almost démodé with the modern telecom technology. But think of the literature that correspondence has created since the ancient times! We have letters of Plato and Plutarch as well as of Saint Paul and many others, most of them enriching and some moving from our dead parents, etc. Letters remain in a drawer as a proof of life passed. La vida breve.
You see, the island is inspiring corny thoughts, but that is how it is. Rimbaud was not corny in his poetry, but he almost had a corny end in Arabia. Nobody is perfect. Oscar Wilde thought he was, and it is true, he wrote Salomé, for me a masterpiece–didn’t he write it in French? I’m sure you‘ll have no problem with old Oscar, you like him too much and rightly so, he was almost hundred years ahead of his time. And he had a sense of humour. I visited his tomb in Paris.
The island looks almost like an English landscape, all green with the blue sea around, but it is full of flowers already, yellow buttercups (or something like that) covering the fields everywhere. Also beautiful mauve ones. I don’t know the names, I’m hopeless. Rousseau, when he got older started getting interested in plants and flowers. Is it a sign of old age? I’m not that interested as yet. I remember I read Rousseau’s Confessions in a sunny hotel room in Casablanca, thirty years ago. From my window I could see a balcony opposite with a tortoise in it. I don’t know how these thirty years have passed. You must learn to carpe diem.
Today I bought a laurel to plant to remind me of the old house in Athens and to dry the leaves for cooking. I’m also planting two fig trees. The old ones died years ago and no Greek garden is conceivable without fig trees. One is supposed to produce white figs and the other, black ones. But the big event is the homage to Dionysos, by planting the vines. They will produce dark red wine (not to be confused with the wine dark sea of Homer.) Unfortunately I will not be here during the planting, because George the Albanian who is going to plant them has gone back to Albania to renew his visa for Greece. The prosaic reality destroys romanticism, although I have not yet visualised George as a Dionysos disciple with a vine crown on his head.
The same birds seem to be around as in the summer. They go about their daily affairs crowing unconvincingly. The nights are cold and there is going to be a full moon on Saturday, my last night here. They predict bad weather as from tomorrow but I hope it will be clear on Saturday. If it is, it will be a good omen. I’m going to build a fire in the fireplace anyway, to celebrate the passing of another winter. And so life flows. Amen.
1 Comment
August 17, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!