... the day's blogging with one of the great openings (of John Cowper Powys's magnificent A Glastonbury Romance):
At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.
Wow!
ReplyDeleteI haven't read it ... Maybe I should ...
Yes, Jeff, you should. I'm going to start writing more about Powys, who I think is the great neglected writer of the 20th century. A Glastonbury Romance is very long. It requires that you rope off a good bit of time every day to read a generous chunk. You have to read it slowly enough to hear the cadences. It took me three weeks when I read it back in the '60s. It was among the time best spent in my life.
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