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
swamprose says:
Tang dynasty, Sancai glaze. if they were horses, we would be travelling first class.
edit. earthenware. george ohr? we can only wish.
Factotum says:
Mediterranean? The three coloured glazes made me think Tang at first, but the scallop shell doesn't seem like an Asian motif....
paintist says:
my initial thought was mediteranean....great with a stopper in and could hold oil....I love 'em, a very lucky find :-)
Factotum says:
Swamprose, no insects, but what are those things? Spears of asparagus? Peapods?
Paintist, they're probably too small to be be functional. They're only about 6 " high, and the hole is smaller than a pencil probably- and partially covered by the little flower (a detail that I really love).
I have them down at the studio, displayed next to a pair of similarly sized Wedgwood bud vases, dark blue jaspar ware with applied porcelain sprigs from the 1920s- It's certainly a pleasing contrast in decorating traditions!
paintist says:
I was thinking that the flower had a function...maybe straining the contents? I see the raised pattern as shell and asparagus....a real challenge to find out more about them isnt it :-)
