Hansen, The Meadow, 1973
It has become the habit for me to spend my afternoons in solitary tramping. A great distance of the surrounding country have I now traversed thus, & the map of the land becomes solid in my brain. Twice these walks were taken in the teeth of heavy rain storms. I walked, it seemed, toward the very front of the torrent, up among grey hills. Both times it swept like driving smoke across the sea, & all the cheerful shapes & colours evaporated. One could just see the hazy outlines of the hills which lifted themselves out of the mist, but the sweep of the bay filled almost instantly with dense vapours. At Knills monument I had to take my bearings, & repeated, "A blinding mist came down & hid the land!" & reflected how easily I might share Lucy's fate. The delight of the country is that all moods of the air & the earth are natural, & therefore fit & beautiful. There is nothing incongruous about a wet day among the hills, as there is when decent streets & brick houses are exposed to the shock of an uncivilised storm. One may fancy even, a storm rejoicing among these granite hills when the wind & rain beat upon them as though they loved the conflict. But the sunny days give one, after all, a more spontaneous pleasure, the scents of the earth & the budding gorse are sucked out of them by the heat, & all the land glows with a mellow August radiance. The air becomes of a richly luminous quality; you see all things through an amber coloured medium.
Up on the hill today the only sound we heard was the tap tap of the stone breakers as they chipped the granite blocks, & we noticed the curious creamy richness of the stone pit in which they stood; the sun every now & then, making it gleam silver.
Virginia Woolf
CONNECT
It has become the habit for me to spend my afternoons in solitary tramping. A great distance of the surrounding country have I now traversed thus, & the map of the land becomes solid in my brain. Twice these walks were taken in the teeth of heavy rain storms. I walked, it seemed, toward the very front of the torrent, up among grey hills. Both times it swept like driving smoke across the sea, & all the cheerful shapes & colours evaporated. One could just see the hazy outlines of the hills which lifted themselves out of the mist, but the sweep of the bay filled almost instantly with dense vapours. At Knills monument I had to take my bearings, & repeated, "A blinding mist came down & hid the land!" & reflected how easily I might share Lucy's fate. The delight of the country is that all moods of the air & the earth are natural, & therefore fit & beautiful. There is nothing incongruous about a wet day among the hills, as there is when decent streets & brick houses are exposed to the shock of an uncivilised storm. One may fancy even, a storm rejoicing among these granite hills when the wind & rain beat upon them as though they loved the conflict. But the sunny days give one, after all, a more spontaneous pleasure, the scents of the earth & the budding gorse are sucked out of them by the heat, & all the land glows with a mellow August radiance. The air becomes of a richly luminous quality; you see all things through an amber coloured medium.
Up on the hill today the only sound we heard was the tap tap of the stone breakers as they chipped the granite blocks, & we noticed the curious creamy richness of the stone pit in which they stood; the sun every now & then, making it gleam silver.
Virginia Woolf
CONNECT
No comments:
Post a Comment