The Hammock Papers: January 2026

01 January 2026

Well.

Punch has words to live well by this time of year (gird your loins for the rest of the drivel) ...

Each swill of port should be chased with a nubbin of Stilton, by a mouthful of port, and so on, in an unending cycle of pleasure.

Mozart, String Quartet in B-Flat Major, K 458, “Hunt”

The Miró Quartet performs the Allegro vivace assai ...

Singing.

HOW the DAY BROKE

The night was very silent, and the moon was going down,

And the winds of dawn were chilling all the sea.

The full tide turned in silver o'er the ridge's length of brown,

When a little muffled figure left the dim-seen, sleeping town

By the white road that leadeth to the sea.

The night was very silent, and the tide was falling fast,

And the dawn was breaking dimly o'er the sea;

The early boats like shadows with their lanterns flitted past,

And the little muffled figure by the sand-hills stayed at last,

Where the waste land opens on the sea.

The night is well-nigh ended, and the moon has gone to rest

And the winds of dawn are lashing all the sea.

But the weariness is over and the doubt is all confessed,

And hope is re-arisen and the wrong is all redressed,

But the little muffled figure lays her head upon his breast

Who has waited for her coming by the sea.

The night is passed and done with, and the day is cold and white

As the loosed winds riot o'er the sea,

But the woe is passed and done with as a shadow of the night,

And the little muffled figure flitteth, singing, out of sight

To the fishing-town that faces on the sea.

Rudyard Kipling

My birdwatching friends tell me, “You’re always seeing birds that don’t exist.” And I answer that my eye seems to change nearly everything it sees and is also drawn to making something out of nothing, a habit since childhood. I’m so unreliable no one asks me “what’s that?” knowing that a Sandhill crane in a remote field can become a yellow Volkswagen. The girl’s blue dress is easily the green I prefer in moments. Words themselves can adopt confusing colors which can become a burden while reading. You don’t have to become what you already are which is a relief.

Today in Sierra Vista while carrying six plastic bags of groceries I fell down. Can that be a curb? What else? The ground rushed up and I looked at gravel inches away, a knee and hands leaking blood.

Time and pain are abstractions you can’t see but you know when they’re with you, like a cold hard wind. It’s time to peel my heart off my sleeve. It sits there red and glistening like a pig’s heart on Grandpa’s farm in 1947 and I have to somehow get it back into my body.

Jim Harrison

Strauss II, Die Fledermaus

Caroline Podola performs Adele's laughing song, "Mein Herr Marquis" with the Zenska Orkiestra Salonowa, conducted by Grzegorz Mierzwinski ...

Jethro Tull, "Life's a Long Song"

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL