30 March 2010

lorry

23 March 2010

Big Sky’s too occupied

god save strawberry jam...

1 March 2010

the years will pass insensibly


Do not be grieved, old friend. I have not failed. I have succeeded. You cannot think with what zest I look forward to life, how full it seems to me and how significant. Sometimes, when you are married to Isabel, you will think of me. I shall build myself a house on my coral island and I shall live there, looking after my trees -- getting the fruit out of the nuts in the same old way that they have done for unnumbered years -- I shall grow all sorts of things in my garden, and I shall fish. There will be enough work to keep me busy and not enough to make me dull. I shall have my books and Eva, and children, I hope, and above all, the infinite variety of the sea and the sky, the freshness of the dawn and the beauty of the sunset, and the rich magnificence of the night. I shall make a garden out of what so short a while ago was a wilderness. I shall have created something. The years will pass insensibly, and when I am an old man I hope I shall be able to look back on a happy, simple, peaceful life. In my small way I too shall have lived in beauty. Do you think it is so little to have enjoyed contentment? We know that it will profit a man little if he gain the whole world and lose his soul. I think I have won mine.

--W. Somerset Maugham: The Fall of Edward Barnard