When I sit in a café I sit in the lineage of all other cafés I have known. I should sit at least once a week in the quiet season, as it is now, and read Gertrude Stein on Paris France. Her plain speech clears the raddled head like a large glass of very fresh cool water. I don't think Gertrude Stein was ever raddled.
The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living. Life is tradition and human nature.
And so in the beginning of the twentieth century when a new way had to be found naturally they needed France.
Really not, french people really do not believe that anything is important except daily living and ground that gives it to them and defending themselves from the enemy. Government has no importance except insofar as it does that.
Gertrude is perhaps, in her time, in her freshness, what my friend Pete Lyle calls haute fuck. It was 1940 and she was able to say Paris was exciting and peaceful. She had lived there since 1903.
As the rain pours down for the first time in months I am fully doused in what the ground gives to me. It takes a pot of gold to raise a rainbow, as Randolph Healy says; maybe have a shot / at a language with no present or future. I open The best of (what's left of) Heaven by Mairead Byrne a time or two in the day. —Quiet, I know what it is. It is a human hand.
At night I've been reading Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse. So much plot and impersonation and machination you cease to care who is doing what to whom, and ride a chapter or two in the early hours.
When you get to know Pongo better, said Lord Ickenham, you will realize that he is always like this — moody, sombre, full of doubts and misgivings. Shakespeare drew Hamlet from him. You will feel better, my boy, when you have had a drink. Let us nip round to my club and get a swift one.