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Guest Post: Letters To Strabo

12 Friday May 2017

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While I’m away, I asked some blogger friends to guest post for me. David Smith, from https://davidsmithauthor.blog/, was kind enough to agree to it. He’s got a new romantic, coming of age book that was recently released. Here’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek interview with the “store manager of Shakespeare and Company.” Check out his book!

David Smith guest blog:

Publicity Interview at Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop in Paris, with best-selling author Adam Finnegan Black for his latest novel Letters to Strabo

(with apologies to Before Sunset)

stabo.jpg

 

Bookstore Manager: So Adam Black, welcome back to Shakespeare and Company, it’s been almost thirty years, hasn’t it?

Adam Black: It has indeed, but it’s great to be back. I see you still have the famous sign upstairs.

Manager:  “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise?” Yes, of course. Now, tell me about the title of your latest novel Letters to Strabo, well my first question is: who is Strabo?

Adam: Strabo was a Greek scholar, writing at the time of Tiberius. He wrote the most comprehensive geography of the Roman world, but it was hardly used until translations in the fifteenth century. I came across it by accident when researching the opening of my book which is set in Olana, the amazing house of the American painter Frederick Church in the Catskills. His wife gave him a copy in 1879 and they named their house Olana after a location cited in the book.

Manager: And I see you replicated both Strabo’s chapter structure but also a similar journey Mark Twain made for his own travel book: The Innocents Abroad.

Adam: Yes, Twain was a friend of the Churches and a great travel writer too. There are some fascinating stories about him and his daughters that I’ve weaved into the plot.

Manager: And why did you call your protagonist Finn, exactly?

Adam: Well, my middle name’s Finnegan and it sort of has a Mark Twain link with Huckleberry Finn and to James Joyce too with Finnegan’s Wake. Strabo often referred to Homer and The Odyssey, which is the inspiration for Joyce’s other masterpiece Ulysses.

Manager: I see, so is it actually a travel book or a book about literature?

Adam: Well, partly both, but it’s mainly a romance, a sort of coming-of-age story. Finn falls for Eve, the archivist at Olana and they correspond throughout his journey round Europe. He has quite a lot of adventures along the way and relates them more or less faithfully to Eve. Her replies are the Letters to Strabo, in which she gradually reveals more about herself. Some of it increasingly disturbing I’m afraid, but you’ll have to read it to find out more about that. I don’t want to spoil it for you.

After some more background, the bookshop manager opens the floor up to questions

French Journalist 1: So do you consider the book to be autobiographical in any way?

Adam: Well I guess everything is autobiographical in a way. There are bits of me in there, but bits of a lot of other people I’ve met too.

French Journalist 1: And the section set here in Paris, in this very bookstore. Was that about you?

Adam: Well, I was here about the same time as Finn visited yes, but the events are of course completely fictional…

French journalist 2: So there was never a girl called Françoise that you met in Spain and travelled with by train to Paris?

Adam: Well, that’s not important; it’s just a story after all

French Journalist 1: Do you think they ever met again after they split up in Venice? In real life I mean?

Adam: No. I’m afraid that I don’t think they ever did, sorry would have done.

French Journalist 2: Maybe a subject for your next book?

Adam: Maybe.

At the back of the room he notices a face in the crowd, a beautiful woman wearing dark glasses. He leans over to the bookshop manager and whispers.

Adam: Look, I’m terribly sorry but I will have to leave now. I have a plane to catch and still have to shop for my wife.

Manager: No problem…Well thank you Adam, we really appreciate you coming here today. I hope you won’t leave it so long next time!

Adam gets up, talks to one or two admirers and then goes over to the woman waiting patiently.

Adam: Françoise?

The woman: I said you’d include me in one of your books one day.

Adam: And I said I wouldn’t ever do that

The woman: Menteur, I think you already did. Do you want to go for coffee somewhere?

Adam: I think I’m gonna miss that plane.

 

Author’s bio

David Smith is a British author who has now published four works under the Troubador imprint. His first novel Searching For Amber has been described as “A powerful and notably memorable debut” with a review describing it as “masterly and confident” and another as “Extraordinary, poetic, enchanting, sublime”. In addition to writing, he is currently CFO of a blue chip UK public company and lives near the South Coast in England with his wife and three teenage children.

https://www.davidsmithauthor.blog

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Mondays With Muddy

23 Monday Jan 2017

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Here is the second to last excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“People are beginning to pack up and get ready to leave right after Labor Day. The Rosenblums have already gone. Three or four other people said goodbye to me on the beach this afternoon. In another few days I shall be virtually alone again. This is where I came in – but with what a difference! I shall miss the friends I’ve made but I find I no longer dread being alone.

It seems that without quite knowing when or how it came about, I have decided to stay, at least for the time being. And after that? After that all I can say is what I heard someone say quite seriously on the radio a few nights ago: ‘The future lies ahead.’

Indubitably!”

Mondays With Muddy

16 Monday Jan 2017

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We’re nearing the end of my grandmother’s unpublished manuscript. I’m still figuring out what comes next, though I did stumble across some more of her writing that I may choose to post once I’ve had a chance to review it. For now though, here is the next installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s Landscape With Figures:

“The stars are usually still shining – at lest some of them – when I wake up in the early morning now. The sun doesn’t come up until after six o’clock.

I used to wonder how the Greeks decided which particular stars to pick out and arrange in constellations. Now I think I understand; they did it either early in the evening or just before dawn when only the brightest stars were visible to choose from. Orion, for instance, stands out vividly about the time I’m sitting up in bed to drink my coffee.

I have made another observation: the coming of the day does not diminish the brightness of the stars, it diminishes their size. They don’t gradually fade out of sight, they gradually grow smaller as if they were withdrawing into their greater remoteness, until they disappear beyond the range of sight.”

Mondays With Muddy

09 Monday Jan 2017

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This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Some time in the small hours of the night I woke up from a deep sleep. Through the windows, which I always leave with the shades up, I could see a star-filled sky. On an impulse I got up, flung on a robe and slippers and walked down to the middle of the field, where I could get an unobstructed view. It was one of those nights when the stars are exceptionally bright, and there was no sound except the gentle swash of waves on the shore, a whisper of wind, and the incessant fiddling of the field crickets.

I thought of the Psalmist, wakeful at night, burdened with the cares of a kingdom, weary from battle, stepping out of his tent, looking up at the sky, and suddenly released and awed: ‘When I consider thy heavens…the moon and the stars…’ I thought of the Babylonians studying the stars to learn their destiny, and the ancient Greeks immortalizing their mythological heroes in them. I thought of the Mayans keeping watch in their observatories to make their extraordinary calculations. I thought of all the unknown millions of men and women who have stood even as I, down through the centuries, gazing at the panorama of stars, listening to the thundering silence beyond the stars, and feeling a mingling of exaltation and fear. And I was glad of those lowly little crickets whose chirping kept the silence and infinitude from being overwhelming.

It was on just such a night of brilliant stars that I used to imagine the word of the Lord coming unto the prophets. I visualized them standing alone in a boundless open space, on top of a mountain or by the sea or most often in the middle of a vast plain, and out of that silent immensity came the revelation. It began perhaps with a shiver down the spine, then visions and words welling up in their minds, and lastly a compelling urge toward utterance.

Last night I wondered if in those awesome moments they, too, were not grateful for the small, humble, down-to-earth crickets making a joyful noise unto the Lord.”

 

Mondays With Muddy

02 Monday Jan 2017

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Here is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“I stood on the beach at the edge of the incoming tide, looking out toward the horizon. It was late morning and an onshore wind was just beginning to whip up. The whole ocean came rushing at me in a succession of waves, not threateningly but with the exhilaration of children racing for the fun of it. Each wave, gathering speed and fullness as it rolled nearer the shore, mounted to its culminating incurve and crashed in a shatter of white spray like a burst of laughter. Then as it flung itself upon the sand, it was magically transformed into a lace mantilla. But only for a moment. It was immediately drawn back into the water, leaving just a wavering, foamy fringe that was promptly covered and absorbed by the next wave completing its course.

As always, the multiplicity of rhythms fascinated me. There was a rhythm in the making and breaking of each individual wave. There was a rhythm in the relationship of the waves to one another in their long rush from the horizon, and also in the sidelong border they made along the beach, not breaking simultaneously but in a successive movement, a kind of arpeggio. And underneath it all was the long, slow pulsation of the incoming tide. I began to feel permeated with all the rhythms as if they were inside me as well as outside.

Then for a second, perhaps only a fraction of a second, there came over me once again that haunting sensation that the scene I was looking at was true but it was not the whole truth, that only an invisible veil separated the two and I could almost…almost…see through it. On the other side of it something stirred as imperceptibly as a bird’s intake of breath before the outpouring of song. Once more I stood on figurative tiptoe, holding myself utterly still, fearful that even the beating of my heart might break the spell.

The moment passed, the nebulous glimpse vanished. The actual scene before my eyes seemed even more beautiful than before but the vision of something ‘other’ had eluded me once again by a hair’s breadth, and once again I was left with a feeling of mingled loss and joy, of wordless wonder which gradually faded as subtly as the color fades out of the sky at sundown. Only the memory of the joy I had felt, not the joy itself, was left.

Now as I write this in the evening, I find that I am left with something more than a memory; I am left with a conviction. I no longer feel I must try to explain away those few fleeting ineffable moments in my life as some kind of psychological illusion. I trust these hints and implications of ‘beyonding’ or a ‘within-ness,’ of a Reality beyond reality that cannot be reached by reason or greater knowledge, not be a more-ness of what we already have and are, but only by a moreoever-ness, a quantum jump (to borrow the phrase again) to another orbit of awareness or being.

I could believe that when Thoreau made his famous remark about the person who keeps pace to the beat of a different drum than his companions hear, he was referring not just to a difference in individual temperament or goals, but to that other orbit or dimension, of which most of us, most of the time, are quite unconscious.”

Mondays With Muddy

05 Monday Dec 2016

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Here is the next installment of Landscape With Figures, the unpublished manuscript of my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page:

” When I woke up a little later than usual this morning, there were already floccules of shell-pink and mauve and dove-gray scattered loosely over the pale sky above the ocean, and through my east window I could see coral and luminous gold streaks just above the spot where the sun was due to appear.

A few minutes later I watched a fiery red sun blaze above the horizon. I could only keep my eyes on it for a second at a time as it rose higher and turned to burning gold. Its rays slanted through the pines, gilding the tips of the needles. Whenever a current of air stirred the branches, the spider threads slung between the twigs were revealed by the tiny hyphens of slippery light that shuttled back and forth on the invisable filaments. Down by the edge of the field the leaves of the poplars looked like thousands of shining coins tossed into the air. Everywhere I looked there was a radiance and freshness.

I wished with all my heart there were someone I could thank for it. Gratitude unfocused and unexpressed is almost painful, like a lump in the throat when you hold back tears.

My mind began to play over all the other beauty I have been privileged to enjoy this summer, not only the beauty of earth and sea and sky, but the beauty – and the truth and the goodness and the love – I have seen in human beings. I thought of Mr. Hollis’s utter simplicity and artlessness. I thought of the little girls painting sand dollars with pure delight. I thought of Dr. Rosenblum’s devotion to music and his wife’s devotion to him. I thought of hte look in Laura’s eyes when she said, ‘I love each and every one of my children with my whole heart!’ I thought of that crystal-clear morning when I was sitting down on the ledges and could almost…almost see through the invisible veil…

And suddenly it struck me with amazement and chagrin that I was not unlike the oldest Peabody sister, Elizabeth, who bumped into a tree when walking across Boston Common and explained, ‘I saw it but I did not realize it.’

How could I have seen evidence of God all about me and not have realized it, I wondered. The answer came at once, clearly, and to my dismay: Because I didn’t want to realize it. It was not that I could not believe in God, but that I did not want to. I still don’t want to. I am afraid of what it may reveal to me about myself. I am afraid of finding I have been living in the dark and may be blinded by the light, like the people in Plato’s cave. I am afraid of being called upon to make sacrifices. I don’t want to give up the directing of my own life, my own egoism, my pride and little vanities, my independence. I hate the word ‘obedience.’

I shall not give up without a struggle. It is only late morning as I write this, but combat fatigue is already beginning to set in.”

 

Mondays With Muddy

28 Monday Nov 2016

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This is the next installment of the unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures, by my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page:

“When I set out as usual for a walk this morning, I had no particular destination in mind. It just happened that I was passing the church over by the cove as people were arriving for the service, and on an impulse I went in too.

It is a typical old New England church, painted white and built with a lovely simplicity of line. On the inside there is a center aisle flanked by two sections of semi-circular pews, all of which had little doors a the ends which latched securely with a decisive click. I thought for a moment I’d actually been locked in just in case I changed my mind. As a matter of fact, my presence wasn’t needed that badly – the place was almost full. Most of the people I’ve met this summer attend one of the churches over in town if they attend any. However, this Stoneleigh church draws people from several communities in the area, most them local residents, I surmise, but with a fairly good percentage of summer people mixed in.

The cornerstone of the congregation seemed to be a row of old ladies with fine, strong features who sat stiff and erect in the front left pew. From where I saw on the opposite side, some rows back, I had an oblique view of their profiles. They looked as if thtey might all be Emerson’s sisters petrified by time.

I was surprised when the minister entered; I hadn’t expected him to be so young. I decided he must be fresh out of seminary and that this was his first incumbency or whatever it’s called.

All through the hymns and preliminaries to the sermon I felt self-conscious and vaguely guilty, as if I were an imposter. It is a long time since I’ve been in church except for a wedding or a funeral. My feeling of awkwardness was increased when I suddenly realized I had no money with me. When the offering was taken up, however, my interest in the way it was done made me forget my embarrassment. Instead of passing a plate, the ushers carefully thrust into each pew a pole from which was suspended a mulberry-colored velvet pouch that delicately muffled the clink of coins.

When the minister began his sermon, I tried to concentrate on what he was saying but most of the time I was thinking about him instead. He was a dark-haired, dark-eyed, very personable young man with good diction, and in spite of his youth his delivery was confident without being cocksure. I liked him, even though I didn’t take in much of what he was saying.

But what was he like when he was not in the pulpit, I wondered? Was he a person I could talk with comfortable or would there be too great a gap between our viewpoints? What made him enter the ministry? Did he grow up with a strong religious faith or was it something he had to struggle to acquire or was it something hat struck him our of the blue? Was he primarily interested in saving souls or in making the church relevant to the world we live in? Had he found a treasure forever beyond my reach?

If I had listened carefully to what he was saying, I might have learned the answers to some of my questions, but my mind and gaze wandered from him to the people around me. What were they really thinking about, what did they feel, what did they really believe? Was that ruddy, stocky, well-dressed man, for instance, really absorbed in the minister’s words or barely holding back his impatience to go fishing on this lovely day? And that slightly pained-looking woman in the flowered print dress – was she having trouble understanding the sermon or did her shoes hurt her?

When the service was over, I tried to sidle out inconspicuously but several strangers came up and greeted me cordially and then my friends, the Mitchells, appeared, looking as surprised to see me there as I was to see them. They offered me a ride home which I declined, but I chatted with them for a few minutes as we walked out together. It seems they’ve been attending that church in the summer ever since they started coming to Stoneleigh nine years ago.

As I was turning to go, Frank asked, ‘Why haven’t we seen you here before?’ I couldn’t decide whether it was an honest questions or whether he was teasing me.

‘It’s a good question,’ I laughed, and went on my way thinking that was the end of it.

But this evening the question has come back.  A little while ago I heard the chapel bell over in the village ringing for vesper service. As always, it seemed to me to have a lonely sound and put me in a slightly melancholy mood.

I visualized a little flock of the faithful straggling along the road – the ones who had no time for churchgoing in the morning, such as the domestics who work for the summer people, or the very pious and forlorn who felt a need to attend church both morning and evening. The image depressed me. I thought it was because I felt sorry for them.

Then without my intention or volition the image changed. I was no longer the creator of it, I was a passive spectator. Instead of a scattering of people along the road, I saw thousands and thousands of people stretching way back into the distance, far beyond eye range – a distance in time as well as space – all pressing forward together toward the chapel. The phrase ‘strnagers and pilgrims on the earth’ went through my mind, and to my utter astonishment I realized it was for myself I felt sorry. I felt a pang of envy and of loneliness. I wanted to belong to that procession.

It was then that Frank’s question came back to me and I asked myself; if instead of evading the question, I had answered it honestly, what would I have said?

I suppose my answer would have gone like this: ‘You don’t see me in church because I’m not sure I even believe in God. I’m one of those who are ‘lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot.’ I’l like to believe in God but I can’t.’

And then if he had asked me why I couldn’t, I suppose I’d have brought up the old argument about all the undeserved suffering in the world not jibing with a lovely and omnipotent Deity, along with all the other timeworn intellectual objections to which no one, so far as I know, has ever found or received an explanation any more specific or satisfactory than the one Job got.

That would have been my answer to Frank. But would it have really been an honest answer? A vague uneasiness tells me it would not. But then  what is the answer?”

Mondays With Muddy

14 Monday Nov 2016

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This is the next installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“For some unknown reason, when I was sitting on the beach this morning the world looked rounder than usual. A sky translucent as bone china arched over an ocean that looked extraordinarily full, as if it might brim over. The balance of the world seemed very precarious. The planet might so easily tilt an inch or two, and then the ocean spilling over the horizon would tilt it further until within moments the whole sea, all the seas, would be pouring over the edge, carrying people, animals, trees, mountains, houses, everything with them pell-mell, helter-skelter. Whoever and whatever wasn’t drowned or crushed by the weight of  water would be catapulted out into the void.

Newton would have been amused at my naivete but for a second I had an inkling of why some people have a phobia about open spaces. I was glad when my ‘vision’ awas interrupted by the arrival of some other people.

One of the men began telling us about a dinner that had been given in his honor. It was quite a long story and his pleasure and complacency were evident throughout the whole recital. When he left us to take a swim, Alice G. said to me sotto voce, ‘Men are so conceited.’

My own opinion is that men in general have less spurious humility than women. They tend toward an obvious, childlike, innocent vanity that is almost appealing. Most of them openly delight in having their pictures taken. They receive honors, publicity, awards of one kind or another with a sort of Little Jack Horner attitude of ‘see-what-a-big-boy-am-I!’

Women are often less candid and try to disguise their vanity with the result it doesn’t have the childlike quality that makes it forgivable. We tend to put on an air of false modesty and then fish for compliments. A=I found a remark of Alice’s a few minutes later much more irritating than Mr. J’s ingenuous boasting.

Apropos some book that had been mentioned, she remarked, ‘I never read novels. I just don’t have the time.’ The implication was that she didn’t have time to waste on reading anything to trivial. In other words, it was an indirect way of boasting about her superior intelligence.

I’ve heard many people make that statement and it always irks me. Reading a good novel is such an enlargement of life. You experience things vicariously that you never could in your own limited life, you visit places you’ll never see in actuality, you entertain new ideas, and most of all you get to know all kinds of people, which deepens your understanding.

Understanding leads to compassion and compassion leads to caring and concern, so I might as well label the end result caritas. It’s a less ambiguous word than love.

Aren’t we being told over and over, both by the psychiatrists and the clergy, that love is the only thing that can unite human beings and so overcome the hate and indifference that is destroying the world? Ergo, if reading fiction is one small step leading to that goal, who dares say it is a waste of time?

Having said that, I am amazed at my own stupidity in ever having questioned not only the justification for art but the desperate need for it in an age of confusion and violence and despair, since art extends our boundaries, opens up greater heights and depths of existence, is ‘life-enhancing.’ If ever we needed dedicated poets and painters and musicians and artists of all kinds, it is now.”

Mondays With Muddy (on a Tuesday)

08 Tuesday Nov 2016

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Admittedly, I’m a bit late with Mondays with Muddy this week. My laptop to a vacation to a service center, and when I got it back, the “d” key wasn’t working, so it had to make a return trip. So I’ve been getting by with S’s computer and my work computer, but it’s been making my time online kind of sparse. I finally got it back today and am working on playing catch up.

But I figure we could all use a charming distraction from this election day with some of my grandmother’s writing. So, without further ado, here is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures:

“A discussion over cocktails at the Stuarts’ as to where we would live and in what period if we had the choice. It made me realize what a provincial New Englander I am at heart. I’ve often thought I’d like to have lived in Concord during the era of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Channing and their friends. I’m not sure that I’d have liked them all or agreed with their strong opinion (anymore than they always areed with one another), but at least you could be certain of an interesting conversation whenever two or three were gathered together.

The town itself was quiet and attractive and neighborly. If you felt in the mood for solitude, there were lovely walks to be taken through outlying meadows and woods and beside the placid Concord Rive with its white pond lilies. I have the impression it was an age of hope and optimism that the world was bound to grow better and better, although everyone seemed to have his own pet scheme for making it better. Or is that impression simply nostalgia?

Carrying my ‘ifs’ a little further, I ask myself: if I could have lived in Concord at that time, and if I could have been anyone I wanted, who would I have chosen to be? The answer is Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. In fact, she comes promptly to mind and excludes all other possibilities.

Sophia, the youngest of the three Peabody sisters, was the prettiest and most charming. She was bookish (she not only read Shakespeare and the English classics, she read Isaiah in Hebrew and Luke in Greek), but not in any pedantic, bluestocking sense; she was gay and witty. She was also a gifted painter but hapy to neglect her own talent to nourish her adored husband’s, ever sensitive to his needs as a person and as a writer, protecting his privacy, never losing faith in his talent, giving him faith in himself through her totally committed heart, always struggling to make ends meet financially and spare him the burden of such worries. In short, an altogether endearing person from a masculine viewpoint, I should imagine.

The real reason I’d have liked to be Sophia, however, is not because she was such an admirable wife, but because she was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife. I fell in love with him in high school when I first saw a picture of him and have never entirely got over it. Judging from Sophia’s description of him, who could blame me or any woman for falling in love with him? She wrote her mother he was ‘a union of power and gentleness, softness and spirit, passion and divine reason…ardent, rapt, tender…’

Nevertheless, one little episode has bothered me ever since I read it a few years ago, in Louise Tharp’s fascinating book on the Peabody sisters, I think. When he came upon his ten-year-old daughter, Rose, writing a story, he scolded her severely and forbade her ever to do such a thing again. Why? It was both cruel and seemingly senseless, and so unlike him. You would have expected him to be proud of her, to have encouraged her, or at least to have reacted with indulgent amusement.

True, he didn’t think much of women writers, although he seemed to have no objections to women painters – or at least those who gave it up for him. Writing, he thought, deprived women of delicacy; they might just as well walk through the street stark naked. Such an attitude just doesn’t fit my image of his character. Even if it had been his misfortune to read only poor writers among the female sex, surely he was intelligent enough to realize there might be a few good ones, too.

It hurts to discover such insensitivity in the man you love, so I try to find some explanation that will put a better light on it. Perhaps Hawthorne, knowing the torment of not being able to write the way he wanted, or sometimes not being able to write at all, of fearing he could not complete a book he’d started, or having completed one, fearing he’d never be able to write another – perhaps knowing all the agony and frustration he’d endured as a writer, he wanted to save his child from such suffering. So he punished her much as a parent spanks a child for running out into the street, not because it was doing something wicked but to make sure it will never get hurt.

That must be the explanation, I tell myself. Still, I’m glad I didn’t know about the episode when I was visiting the Old Manse some years ago. It would have spoiled my impression of the Hawthornes’ idyllic family life.

I remember sitting down on the window seat in the upstairs hall that day and imagining myself as Sophia. It was a lovely summer day and as I gazed out on the tranquil Concord River, I could almost see Thoreau drifting down it in his green dory, as I imagined Sophia must have seen him sometimes. Yielding to an impulse, I exclaimed, as I imagined she must have, ‘Here comes Henry!’

Instinctively, all the sightseers passing through the hall turned their heads to look out the window, before they eyed me a little uneasily and filed on down the stairs.”

Mondays With Muddy

31 Monday Oct 2016

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This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“A very soft, feathery, pocket-sized breeze has sprung up this morning. I wish I could think of another word for it. ‘Breeze’ has too sharp an edge: it should be reserved for small winds that are brisk and invigorating. As a matter of fact, on consulting the dictionary, I find that it was originally a nautical term deriving from a Spanish and Portuguese word meaning ‘northeast wind,’ and similar to an Italian word meaning ‘cold wind from the north.’

The only word I know for the kind of wind barely stirring the curtains now is ‘zephyr’ and that’s too poetic and affected for everyday use. Apparently the only way to get around the difficulty is to make a phrase: a ‘breath of air,’ for instance, or a ‘current of air,’ or a ‘tiny puff of wind.’

There is another word I feel is missing when I shift my eyes to the poplar down by the edge of the field. When a good breeze blows through them and the sun is shining on the leaves, they appear to twinkle. But when, as today, there are just little puffs of air stirring through them, the sunlight glinting and glancing off them is not quivery enough to be called a twinkle. I can’t think of any word that describes the rather indolent, intermittent gleaming.

In spite of the richness and flexibility of the English language, it lacks a number of needed words. Most of the new words that are added to the language are either technical or slang. Why do so few writers create new words? There is James Joyce, of course, but his neologisms were mostly made up of combinations of words or plays on words. Gerard Manly Hopkins created several words that admirably served their intended purpose – words like ‘inscape’ and ‘wanwood,’ for example – but they have never become part of general usage.

What is harder to understand is why we have let so many useful and onomatopoetic words fall into desuetude. For instance, the old New England word, ‘scoon,’ meaning to skim, sail or skip upon the water, from which ‘schooner’ presumably derives. Or ‘dornick,’ meaning a stone of a size suitable for throwing. And ‘springal,’ meaning an active youth. How better describe that appealingly gangly lad I saw on the beach early this morning, just looking for something to do, than as a springal searching for dornicks to throw in the water?”