R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 31

Broad-billed Hummingbird

My Best Three Pics (IMHO) of the Broad-billed Hummingbird Visiting in Glendora CA. (A smart photog who stopped by while I was there claimed this beauty has another name South of the Border: something like The Blue Gem, which, right or wrong, easily makes sense. Beautiful by any other name. I'm thinking: He probably has a secret name and/or a silent name.;))♥️🎈

#rlswihart13 #glendora #socal #magicalvisitor #hummingbirdsofinstagram #broadbilledhummingbird #bluegem #secretname #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️

W G Sebald: The Emigrants

Ambrose was one of the first of our patients to undergo a series of shocks, over a period of weeks and months; but that docility, as I was already beginning to suspect, was in fact due simply to your great-uncle’s longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember.

W G Sebald: The Emigrants

It was, I thought, particularly auspicious that the rows of houses were interrupted here and there by patches of waste land on which stood ruined buildings, for ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble, fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air.

Owlets in Valencia CA

Is someone getting all the food?;)

Anyway the older sib is in charge and looking for Momma. Spring has sprung, or is at least on its way.

#rlswihart13 #valenciaca #nearmagicmountain #owlets #waitingformom #owlsofinstagram #greathornedowl #nature #beauty #poetry #tgif #weekend #readmorepoetry2024♥️

Henry James: In the Cage

This morning everything changed, but rather to dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory about fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed with absolute levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at hand—at Park Chambers—and belonged supremely to the class that wired everything, even their expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote, his correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and he might be in and out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the prospect, and by reason of its positive excess of light, a perverse melancholy, a gratuitous misery.  This was at once to give it a place in an order of feelings on which I shall presently touch.

Henry James: Daisy Miller

By this time Daisy had turned her attention again to Winterbourne. "I've been telling Mrs. Walker how mean you were!" the young girl announced. "And what is the evidence you have offered?" asked Winterbourne, rather annoyed at Miss Miller's want of appreciation of the zeal of an admirer who on his way down to Rome had stopped neither at Bologna nor at Florence, simply because of a certain sentimental impatience. He remembered that a cynical compatriot had once told him that American women--the pretty ones, and this gave a largeness to the axiom-- were at once the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness.

Henry James: Hawthorne

Certainly, I am inclined to think, if one had encountered these delicate, dusky flowers in the blossomless garden of American journalism, one would have plucked them with a very tender hand; one would have felt that here was something essentially fresh and new; here, in no extraordinary force or abundance, but in a degree distinctly appreciable, was an original element in literature. When I think of it, I almost envy Hawthorne's earliest readers; the sensation of opening upon The Great Carbuncle, The Seven Vagabonds, or The Threefold Destiny in an American annual of forty years ago, must have been highly agreeable.

Red-breasted Merganser @ Bolsa Chica

 

Henry James: The Figure in the Carpet

"By my little point I mean--what shall I call it?--the particular thing I've written my books most FOR. Isn't there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn't write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? Well, it's THAT!" I considered a moment--that is I followed at a respectful distance, rather gasping. I was fascinated--easily, you'll say; but I wasn't going after all to be put off my guard. "Your description's certainly beautiful, but it doesn't make what you describe very distinct." "I promise you it would be distinct if it should dawn on you at all." I saw that the charm of our topic overflowed for my companion into an emotion as lively as my own. "At any rate," he went on, "I can speak for myself: there's an idea in my work without which I wouldn't have given a straw for the whole job. It's the finest fullest intention of the lot, and the application of it has been, I think, a triumph of patience, of ingenuity. I ought to leave that to somebody else to say; but that nobody does say it is precisely what we're talking about. It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. So it's naturally the thing for the critic to look for. It strikes me," my visitor added, smiling, "even as the thing for the critic to find." This seemed a responsibility indeed. "You call it a little trick?" "That's only my little modesty. It's really an exquisite scheme." "And you hold that you've carried the scheme out?" "The way I've carried it out is the thing in life I think a bit well of myself for."

Eagle: Bolsa Chica: Video