This from the wonderful Cate Kennedy’s first collection of short stories. Her new collection is Like a House on Fire.
Just wait, and the sea returns everything to you.
—Cate Kennedy, ‘Flotsam’, Dark Roots
Tag Archives: photographs
December fragments #8
Filed under December fragments 2012
December fragments #7
Seen, looking up, in a métro carriage in Paris. I love a city that reveres its poets.
Le poème—cette hésitation prolongée entre le son et le sens.
(The poem—that prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning.)
—Paul Valéry
Filed under December fragments 2012
December fragments #4
One of the things I love about fragments is their inherent ambiguity.
… the camera could lie after all. Proffering a fractional moment caught in time, with no sense of the before or after, nor all the things that made it so. A false imprint that cheated memory.
—Emylia Hall, The book of summers
Filed under December fragments 2012
December fragments #3
From one of my favourite novels of 2012, much awarded, and deservedly so. Anna Funder will be giving the closing address at the Perth Writers Festival in February 2013.
The clouds are retreating over the street and the front garden, away from me in my dressing gown in my house, out to sea. In Sydney’s spring they perform each morning, rolling back from us like a tin-lid on sardines. The birdcall is intense. I choose to believe it is joy at the new day, but I know they’re checking to see who has made it through the night.
—Anna Funder, All that I am
Filed under December fragments 2012
December fragments #2
I love these lines, recently seen on a signboard in Central Park, New York City:
I’ve wandered the earth in search of life
bird by bird I’ve come to know the earth.
—Pablo Neruda
Filed under December fragments 2012
December fragments #1
Last year I shared with Facebook friends a photograph and quote every day throughout December. The images came from my year’s travels and observations; the words, from writers who had caught my interest, my admiration, my breath. I’ve been gathering more during 2012 and will post them here (so Looking up/looking down will be a more-than-occasional blog just for this month).
The first quote is from one of my favourite writers …
Circular Quay: she loved even the sound of it.
Before she saw the bowl of bright water, swelling like something sexual, before she saw the blue, unprecedented, and the clear sky sloping upwards, she knew from the lilted words it would be a circle like no other, key to a new world.
—Gail Jones, Five Bells
Filed under December fragments 2012
Look both ways, Charlotte
Welcome to Looking up/looking down—an occasional blog about writing, reading and watching the world.
Why looking up/looking down? Well, it’s something I like to do when I take photographs—and when I write, too. It reminds me that the world can’t be framed, that we can only ever see fragments, that there are infinitely more views to be seen and heard than we imagine.
I’m currently writing a novella, and I found my main character, an ageing expatriate Australian living in Paris, thinking this:
When you reach an age—you’ll know it when it comes—looking forward won’t do. Looking back, if you let it, can consume every breath you take. But looking up, looking down … it’s here, in these oblique moments, that we truly live, where it’s possible to find joy.
Stop and smell the roses? Live in the present? Yes, I need to be reminded of that, even if it does come from someone who, at the moment, doesn’t live anywhere except in my head!
Charlotte Brontë put it more simply:
I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
To which I would only add: look down, too.
Filed under Welcome
looking up/looking down 