by Factotum
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"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self."
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and The Good
What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.
V. Woolf
" She strung the afternoon on the necklace of memorable days, which was not too long for her to be able to recall this one or that one; this view, that city; to finger it, to feel it, to savour, sighing, the quality that made it unique."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
"Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions."
Vladamir Nabokov
,snow ploughs,snow removal
oh wow there's a spectacle my kids would love. I have only ever seen one snowplough in action, when the entire caving club were snowed in a pub in a remote derbyshire village after our christmas dinner... life can be so kind sometimes!
swamprose says:
I love the snowblower.
Toronto doesn't have them.
Growing up, there was always the story about the kid who got eaten by the snowblower....
Unfortunately, the story might have been true. There ARE people killed by snow removal equipment in Quebec every winter. You'll notice that there is a worker who walks ahead of the snow blower- you can see him on the left in this photo.
swamprose says:
back in the day, there was just a snowblower, spitting out onto the lawns, and a very wrapped-up little man who walked alone, in front of the blades, holding a small red flag.
now that I remember, it is all so vulnerable. the little roly poly man with the small flag as defense. the legend was about him getting eaten up...and great descriptions of how the blood and guts looked on the snow. might be a great painting..
Most accidents happen at night during storms, when pedestrians are walking on the roads and the big snowploughs are racing around just pushing snow to the sides. Poor visiblity is usually involved
O.K. but make it a night video of snow with flashing red accents and the distinctive sound of that horn warning people to get up at 3:00 a.m. to move their cars