strange things

'But really Mattis', she said with a toss of her head, 'you think up so many strange things these days that I hardly recognise you.'

This testimony made him light up with joy. Hege knew how to make you happy when she wanted to. He went and sat down by himself to be alone with his joy.

I have been rereading The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas these nights, for the clean otherness of Norway. Mattis lives with his sister Hege by a lake. She knits jumpers to earn a living. He thinks up a job as ferryman, he has only one passenger ever, but he goes ferrying every day. He has a job to go to. He takes sandwiches. His simplicity sets him apart. He ferries no one in his leaky boat that couldn't take a passenger anyway. 

The canadian woman at the radical book fair on Saturday nearly knew strangeness by heart.

Reality could be avoided.

It's possible.

No one who looks at me

believes I am dancing.

She said it across our table of books. Like Mattis having his strange things acknowledged. She looked along the display of Coloured Books, and sometimes at me, disbelieving. She'd been in Cork for three months, au pairing. This was the end of her stay. The privacy of that internal dancing was suddenly there between us.

News from Nowhere, William Morris, Road Books

It is one thing to read News from Nowhere on holiday in Portugal, another to read it at home and interrogate your own reading with a view to creating a book. Leonard Cohen could take ten years to write a song. Bob Dylan was closer to ten minutes. We took about two weeks.

My sympathies are with utopia, with nowhere. I can relate to yearning. I am all for idealism. If you can't dream ahead what's the point of walking? As William Morris makes his way up the Thames in his post-Revolution utopian reverie, I can follow.

Conversations about utopia have plenty of brick walls and blind alleys, many a gaping void. It's a question of how long you can suspend disbelief. How much you desire. A question of who you are. For whatever reason. And there are always volumes of reasons.

William Morris's News from Nowhere is poignant in its excess. I want him to describe his ideal society, after the revolution, I lament its unreality. For him in 1890 as for us in 2016.

Out of these thoughts, these considerations, came this book.