There are moments in our lives that stand out clear and shining against the sun of the soul, and in those moments the Being becomes suffused by a radiant light. This light blots out for a time the dark texture of the years through which we have passed. The soul becomes charged with new life […]
On the corner of the High Street and Crane Bridge Street stands an old timbered building. For many decades this used to be Beach’s Bookshop. It had an incredible range of old books. Mr Beach would even buy school text books and put them out for sale. There are quite a few images of the […]
David died on the 6th November 2020 aged 94 Shiki said that in order to write a haiku a good mental discipline to follow was to look down at the violet at your feet and then look up at the distant mountain. David’s version of this might have been to take infinite care of a […]
I write a fairly regular ‘essay’ in a series called RANSACKING THE PAST for display on The British Haiku Society Website. Sometimes I dredge books of my own early haiku for ones I could have done better (most of them) and write a critique, sometimes I look at old articles in Blithe Spirit (the BHS […]
I’ve just read JBPriestley’s They Walk in the City (1936) Edward Greenfield refuses to go along with the kind of life that his smug brother Herbert has designed for himself. The latter had made his great gesture when he had determined to be an analytical chemist and, in face of many obstacles, lack of money […]
I’ve been pondering the idea Gurdjieff/Ouspensky, refer to as ‘Magnetic Centre’, a certain something-or-other inside us that plays some part in the development and maintenance of enhanced consciousness in human life. It sounds very elitist but in the circumstances of life as we find them, it is an objective fact that only a very few […]
It’s late October 2019. Time for re-reading The Four Men yet again is fast approaching. I want to get my series of writings on him done by Halloween. Unless they are similarly obsessed I can’t imagine anybody being interested in any of this, or in my quest, on the face of it, anyway, one from […]
For nearly seventy years I’ve been what I suppose could be called a Belloc-fanatic. The question is – How could that be the case when he was a died-in-the-wool Roman Catholic, of an anti-pacifist, anti-vegetarian persuasion? I think I must have just relegated all that (on his account) to the category ‘unthink’, and (for myself) […]
I’ve read another book. Judging from the very neat pencil underlinings it looks as though I’ve read it before sometime. Since I often wonder why it has been my habit for sixty-odd years, I was interested to find that the underlinings were very helpful generally but especially during the course of more or less skim-reading […]
For solace and enthusiasm, I’ve been re-reading HGWells’ The Outlook for Homo [so-called] Sapiens. He says he hammers at his main ideas which ‘offends delicate-minded people’ but has always attempted to resolve contradictions, struggled for effective knowledge, working ‘not simply for knowledge but for stark clarity of thought about it…’ All it’s possible to do […]
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