Monday, September 22, 2008

surfing, no sun.. but, litterary connections

Yesterday, a brisk wind is good for wind surfing. For me, who, now too old, would like nothing better, it has to be a vicarious sport. I watch it, expertly performed with sail, and at greater speed, more spectacularly, with a kite, a single curved wing. Then another kite appears. When the two kite surfers draw level, the two kites join up against the sky, for a few moments, to form the letter "m".

The sea is calm today. No one is on the beach. It is raining. We swim in the rain.

Some months ago I was talking on the telephone to an old friend of Heidi´s, a recently retired Professor of Dramatic Studies at the University of Berlin. In the same conversation, he asks me how to get hold of the Letters of Virginia Woolf, and later he enthuses about Any Human Heart, the novel by William Boyd. I failed to ask him why he wanted the Woolf letters. Today, as I read, with great enjoyment, Any Human Heart, I find a specific reference to the letters. I have the answer. The connexion is made.

3 comments:

Lucas said...

Very enjoyable posts - the sense of sea's proximity and the way you have observed and recorded. I think I know exactly what you meant about the way the objects take on a new closeness - as you point out due to visual geometry.
I like William Boyd.

Roderick Robinson said...

I see you have become more tolerant about foreigners playing frivolous games on beaches (a couple of posts down). When you saw two French adults at Perros Guirec holding a loop of rope on which a plastic doughnut sped backwards and forwards (the game? sport? was called Apollo, I think) you snorted and said they should be forced to learn cricket.

Lucy said...

What fun this is!

That kite surfing is really quite an elegant sport isn't it? I first saw it in Australia, but where we tend to meet and hand my sister over to my brother near St Malo is a national school of it, and the shores are quite alive with it in the summer.

'Palimpcestuous' is a tremendous word...