Tuesday, July 13, 2004

A pillar of light and the most perfect breakfast

Found this at Half-Price Books in About Books: Five Talks from the Jerusalem International Book Fair.
A book is not a manuscript that has been set in type and bound. A book is a physical object that is surrounded by an aura. It is surrounded by a halo, a visible halo. Many books, and you with them, move through the desert in your publishing house, but only a few attain a golden cloud that hovers above the book and that moves with it through the editorial and production and marketing process, a pillar of light that is visible to all from a great distance.

-- Erwin A. Glikes
Here is another I love from The Once And Future King, book one: The Sword In The Stone. This is the breakfast Merlin has steaming in his cottage when Wart (the young King Arthur), lost in the woods, arrives. They had never met before but Merlin, living backwards, knew Wart would be coming.
The Wart saw that the most perfect breakfast was laid out neatly for two, on a table before the window. There were peaches. There were also melons, strawberries and cream, rusks, brown trout piping hot, grilled perch which were much nicer, chicken devilled enough to burn one's mouth out, kidneys and mushrooms on toast, fricassee, curry, and a choice of boiling coffee or best chocolate made with cream in large cups.

-- T. H. White

1 comment:

Scott said...

You do find some very nice quotes.

Your reading of Arthur somehow brings to mind Peter Pan for me, likely because of their place in my younger years. I found two old scripts by Barrie, and hope to read them in the next month. The first few pages I read in one was mostly stage direction and setting, and somehow reminded me of his Never Never Land in tone before I realized he'd written of Peter Pan. I'll have to read them in the next month. There is a magic quality I want to get a feel of for my next writing project.