george whitman

Shakespeare & Co. is my idea of the perfect refuge, and while my Parisian affair was brief, I spent a generous amount of time in this warm, affable bookstore just across the Seine from Notre Dame.

The Sundance Channel aired a special on George Whitman, ex-patriot and owner of Shakespeare & Co., entitled Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man. At the end of the documentary, Whitman recites the poem below. I fell in love with his cadence, the serenity in his gaze, the simplicity of that moment he chose to share his poem, the eccentricity of his haircut. I’ve memorized his poem and it’s morphed into mantra of sorts; I catch myself thinking the words without realizing I’m doing so.

Here is my best effort at putting this poem on paper (so to speak). I can't find it in written form, trust me, I've tried:

Among the visions which my fancies trace
There was one brightest star, one face -
One image from afar filled with syruped grace

Each poem is her heart’s fantasy
Each flower and tree is framed within her memory
Each dream, each midnight, and each dawn
Are garments, thoughts of her put on

Each beam of light from the imperial blue
With her in falls the good
The beautiful
The true

you crazy child

My morning coffee has served it's purpose, and now I am alert after a seventeen hour work day. (Monday's and month-ends are not the most promising combination.) Heavy lidded eyes and the almost-mistaking of my morning oatmeal for a soft down pillow have me wishing for something comforting and familiar. So naturally, I've turned my Pandora station to Billy Joel in hope that I'll hear Vienna, the song that serves as my sweet and subtle slap on the wrist when my work/life balance begins to slip.

Slow down, you're doing fine. You can't be everything you want to be before your time, although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight. Too bad but it's the life you lead, you're so ahead of yourself that you forgot what you need - though you can see when you're wrong, you know you can't always see you're right.

When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?

[image via Merisi, author of a brilliant Viennese blog]

Quote D'Jour or Nabokov's Glory Once More

"...and what a condiment that was to being in love, what bliss to stand in the wind next to a laughing woman with wind-blown hair, whose bright skirt would now be worried, now pressed against her knees by the same breeze that had once filled Ulysses' sails... and there she is again, aboard someone else's yacht, sparkling, laughing, flinging coins into the water."

[Glory by Vladimir Nabokov, chapters 9 & 20]

star mist velvet travelvet

Santorini 

"A star fell: as so often annoyingly happens, it fell not quite in his field of vision, but off to the side, so that his eye caught only the twinge of a soundless change in the sky. . .'Travel,' said Martin softly, and he repeated this word for a long time, until he squeezed all meaning out if it, upon which he set aside the long, silky skin it had shed - and next moment the word returned to life. 'Star. Mist. Velvet. Travelvet,' he would articulate carefully and marvel every time how tenuously the sense endures in the sound. In what a remote spot this young man had arrived, what far lands he had already seen, and what was he doing here, at night, in the mountains, and why was everything in the world so strange, so thrillful? 'Thrillful,' Martin repeated aloud, and liked the word. Another star went tumbling." 

[Glory by Vladimir Nabokov, chapter 11]