Words, Music, & Outdoor Adventures

“And you can tell everybody this is your song
It may be quite simple but now that it’s done
I hope you don’t mind
I hope you don’t mind that I put down in words
How wonderful life is while you’re in [my] world”*

It’s the birthday of the novelist Zadie Smith,*born in London (1975). She grew up black in a working-class London neighborhood, living in a housing project that was half English and half Irish. …She spent all of her free time either tap dancing or reading. She later wrote, “It is a mixture of perversity and stomach-sadness that makes a young person fashion a cocoon of other people’s words. If the sun was out, I stayed in; if there was a barbecue, I was in the library. … By the time I arrived at college*… I was perfectly equipped to write the kind of fiction I did write: saturated by other books; touched by the world, but only vicariously.” … College at Cambridge was Zadie Smith’s dream come true. She described it as, “People reading books in a posh place.” Whereas she’d been a weirdo in high school for being black, suddenly she became exotic and mysterious to her classmates. And she began writing a lot. While she was cramming for her final exams, she banged out 100 pages of a potential novel and sent it off to an agent.
She moved to America to get away from everything. She began teaching a class at Harvard, and she found that living in New England changed her way of looking at the world. She said, “Suddenly there was place. Real place. Not just shops and corner shop owners and buses. But place, and that was fantastic.”

Zadie Smith said, “I’m influenced by everything I read, shamelessly. … I think if I carry on plagiarizing for 15 years, it will settle like silt, and I’ll write something really great.”

The necklace is from*Italy in the*Moreno region, known for its style of glassware and blowers.

Where has the necklace been you asked?*Venice, Florence, and Rome, Italy; Vienna, Austria; Krakow, Poland; Prague, Czech Republic; Munich, Germany; Interlaken Switzerland; and Amsterdam The Netherlands. Very well travelled.

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.

Mansfield lived so freely in the London bohemian scene that she eventually had to destroy her own diaries for fear of incriminating evidence….She had to settle down a bit when her mother came to London and threatened to put her in a convent. She said, “How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?”

She wrote sketches and essays for various newspapers and journals, but she didn’t begin to write the stories that made her famous until her younger brother came to visit her in 1915. They had long talks over the course of the summer, reminiscing about growing up in New Zealand. She hadn’t seen him in years and found that she had more in common with him than any other member of the family. …She wrote,

“How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you / you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences / little rags and shreds of your very life.”

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice - - -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.*…But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do - - - determined to save
the only life you could save.*