With apologies to Mr. Toibin - - - - from his fantastic short story book The Empty Family: -
"The sight of the waves miles out, their dutiful and frenetic solitude, their dull indifference to their fate, made me want to cry out, - - - It came to me then that the sea is not a pattern, it is a struggle. Nothing matters against the fact of this. The waves were like people battling out there, full of consciousness and will and destiny and an abiding sense of their own beauty.
- - - - - I turned and moved fast, focusing on a wave I had selected for no reason. There was whiteness and greyness in it and a sort of blue and green. It was a line. It did not toss, nor did it stay still. It was all movement, all spillage, but it was pure containment as well, utterly focused just as I was watching it. It had an elemental hold; it was something coming towards us as though to save us but it did nothing instead, it withdrew in a shrugging irony, as if to suggest that this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervor, to end in nothing on a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had all set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy."
This is a marvelous, insightful, poetic book of short stories!
The climbing hydrangea is flowering now in June while it clings to the bricks of my chimney. It may bring the chimney down; hopefully that will not happen in my lifetime! (Click to enlarge.)
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