Countryside Love Quotes

It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths, And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat: Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet. I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak, I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul; And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy, through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman. "Sensation

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

And beyond the timeless meadows and emerald pastures, the rabbit holes and moss-covered oak and rowan trees and the "slippy sloppy" houses of frogs, the woodland-scented wind rushed between the leaves and blew around the gray veil that dipped below the fells, swirling up in a mist, blurring the edges of the distant forest. (View from Windermere in the Lake District)

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing.

What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation.

There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have become familiar sights and can touch our hearts like happy events. Sometimes indeed the memory goes back towards a forest glade, or a spot on a river bank or an orchard in blossom, glimpsed only once on a happy day, but preserved in our heart.

She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws. She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red.

I want open fields, crisp air, and the Rocky Mountains at the end of the horizon. I want a man who smells like leather, looks like a glass of bourbon, and who calls me princess while drawing on my back.

The path trodden by wayfarers and pilgrims followed the railway and then turned into the fields. Here Lara stopped, closed her eyes and took a good breath of the air which carried all the smells of the huge countryside. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the meaning of her life. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, then, out of love of life, to give birth to heirs who would do it in her place.

Mr. Haverbink bowed deeply, muscles rippling all up and down his back, and lumbered from the room. Miss Hisselpenny sighed and fluttered her fan. "Ah, for the countryside, what scenery there abides..., " quoth she. Miss Tarabotti giggled. "Ivy, what a positively wicked thing to say. Bravo.

One fine moonlit night, Mortain and his Wild Hunt were riding through the countryside when they spied two maids more beautiful than any they had ever seen before. They were picking evening primrose, which only blooms in the moonlight. “The two maids turned out to be Amourna and Arduinna, twin daughters of Dea Matrona. When Mortain saw the fair Amourna, he fell instantly in love, for she was not only beautiful but light of heart as well, and surely the god of death needs lightness in his world. “But the two sisters could not be more different. Amourna was happy and giving, but her sister, Arduinna, was fierce, jealous, and suspicious, for such is the dual nature of love. Arduinna had a ferocious and protective nature and did not care for the way Mortain was looking at her beloved sister. To warn him, she drew her bow and let fly with one of her silver arrows. She never misses, and she didn’t miss then. The arrow pierced Mortain’s heart, but no one, not even a goddess, can kill the god of death. “Mortain plucked the arrow from his chest and bowed to Arduinna. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For reminding me that love never comes without cost

Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside

And while the rain swept across the desolate countryside like a cleansing force, they made love to each other – their union not that of heated bodies in need of release, nor that of kindred spirits in certainty of love, but that of broken souls in search of solace.

I’ve always loved tales of broken lovers who roam through countrysides singing their stories of woe and separation, their honey- sweet longing for the next life when they can suddenly be re united. It makes other people happy, you see. It makes people grateful that it hasn’t happened to them.

Children, you must understand, are monsters. They are ravenous, ravening, they lope over the countryside with slavering mouths, seeking love to devour. Even when they find it, even if they roll about in it and gorge themselves, still it will never be enough. Their hunger for it is greater than any heart to satisfy. You mustn't think poorly of them - we are all monsters that way, it is only that when we are grown, we learn more subtle ways to snatch it up, and secretly slurp our fingers clean in dark corners, relishing even the last dregs. All children know is a sort of clumsy pouncing after love. They often miss, but that is how they learn.

Sometimes in life you just have to take a leap of faith.

Most helpful, Mr. Caelum," she said. "Very, very useful information. And now, shall we hear from Saint Augustine?" I shrugged. "Why not?" I said Dr. P read from a blood-red leather book. "My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry.... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?" She closed the book, then reached across the table and took Maureen's hand in hers. "Does that passage speak to you?" she asked. Mo nodded and began to cry. "And so, Mr. Caelum, good-bye." Because the passage had spoken to me, too, it took me a few seconds to react. "Oh," I said. "You want me to leave?" "I do. Yes, yes.

February 13, 1936 I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps... Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.

When people visit my farm they often envision their dog, finally off-leash in acres of safely fenced countryside, running like Lassie in a television show, leaping over fallen tree trunks, shiny-eyed with joy at the change to run free in the country. While they're imagining that heartwarming scene, their dog is most likely gobbling up sheep poop as fast as he can. Dog aren't people, and if they have their own image of heaven, it most likely involves poop.

Which was what she hated about the countryside, no distraction from the dirty messed-up workings of the heart.

Yes. Perhaps I have lived with love, not against it. Love is not just a bourgeois romantic notion of finding the one true match who will fill one's soul so full that it brims over and splashes out uninterruptedly as if from some eternal pump. Love is also in this life that I've lived here in the countryside. And when I chose this life and pursued it and didn't regret it, I learned that one should stick to one's decision, nurture it and not deviate—that this is an expression of love.

The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn . . . spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end . . . earth scents and the sky winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul.

The train whistled, and chuffed out of the station. The children pressed their noses to the window and watched the dirty houses and the tall chimneys race by. How they hated the town! How lovely it would be to be in the clean country, with flowers growing everywhere, and birds singing in the hedges! Pg 5

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul: we search for its outlines all over our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in a place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. there are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved, or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock or recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

We survey lush landscapes with variations not dissimilar to a so-called "imperfect" female body with absolute pleasure -- say, an expanse of Irish countryside with grassy rolling hills. But is it really so much uglier when it's made of flesh instead of soil?

But sometimes even people who care about each other need some time apart.

How irrevocably spoilt, down to its minutest detail, his world was now. Even the countryside was spoilt, the animals, the birds, the flowers. There was nowhere to run to.

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again. This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned.

Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?" "I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back." But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky. To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.

People have always associated the country with love, and they have done well; nothing affords so fine a frame for the woman whom one loves as the blue sky, the odours, the flowers, the breeze, the shining solitude of fields, or woods. However much one loves a woman, whatever confidence one may have in her, whatever certainty her past may offer us as to her future, one is always more or less jealous. If you have been in love, you must have felt the need of isolating from this world the being in whom you would live wholly.

To My Wife You are like a young white hen. Her feathers ruffle in the wind, her neck curves down to drink, and she rummages in the earth: but, in walking, she has your slow, queenly step, haughty and proud. She is better than the male. She is like the females of all the serene animals who draw near to God. Here, if my eye, if my judgment doesn’t deceive me, among these, you find your equals, and in no other woman. When evening lulls the little hens to sleep, they make sounds that call to mind those mild, sweet voices with which you argue with your pains, and don’t know that your voice has the soft, sad music of the henyard. You are like a pregnant heifer, still free, and without heaviness, merry, in fact; who, if someone strokes her, turns her neck, where a tender pink tinges her flesh. If you meet up with her, and hear her bellow, so mournful is this sound that you tear at the earth to give her a present. In the same way, I offer my gift to you when you are sad. You are like a tall, thin female dog, that always has so much sweetness in her eyes and ferociousness in her heart. At your feet, she seems a saint who burns with an indomitable fervor and in this way looks at you as her God and Lord. When you are at home, or going down the street, to anyone who tries, uninvited, to approach you, she uncovers her shining white teeth. And her love suffers from jealousy. You are like the fearful rabbit. Within her narrow cage, she stands upright to look at you, and extends her long, still ear; she deprives herself of the husks and roots that you bring her, and cowers, seeking the darkest corners. Who might take away this food? Who might take away the fur which she tears from her back to add to the nest where she will give birth? Who would ever make you suffer? You are like the swallow which returns in the spring. But each autumn will depart— you don’t have this art. You have this of the swallow: the light movements; that which, to me, seemed and was old, you proclaim another spring. You are like the provident ant. She whom the grandmother speaks of to the child as they go out in the countryside. And thus I find you in the bumble bee and in all the females of all the serene animals who draw near to God. And in no other woman.

Here had lived an elder race, to which we look back with disquietude. The country which we visit at week-ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields.

Outside, the night was settling fast. I liked the peace and the silence of the countryside, with its fading alpenglow and darkling view of the river. Oliver country, I thought. The mottled lights from across the other bank beamed on the water, reminding me of Van Gogh’s 'Starlight Over the Rhone.' Very autumnal, very beginning of school year, very Indian summer, and as always at Indian summer twilight, that lingering mix of unfinished summer business and unfinished homework and always the illusion of summer months ahead, which wears itself out no sooner than the sun has set.

Phoebe asked me, "Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?" I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. "I have no faith at all," I said, "but sometimes I have hope." I rather think," she replied, "that total annihilation is the most comfortable position." I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us. When I die," she said, "I don't expect to see any of my loved ones again. I'll just become a part of all this." She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. "That's all right with me.

You'd never have gotten it right. You have to hit the door just so. It took me weeks to learn." "And what were you doing sneaking out at night?" he demanded. "I fail to see how that is your business." "You became my business when you took up residence in my house." "Well, I wouldn't have moved in if you hadn'tkidnapped me!" "I wouldn't have kidnapped you if you hadn't been wandering about the countryside with no thought to your own safety." "I was certainly safer in the countryside than I was at Prewitt Hall, and you well know it." "You wouldn't be safe in a convent," he muttered. "If you two lovebirds can stop snapping at each other," James cut in, "I'd like to search the study before Prewitt returns home." Blake glared at Caroline as if this entire delay were her fault, causing her to hiss, "Don't forget that if it weren't for me-" "If it weren't for you," he shot back, "I would be a very happy man indeed." "We are wasting time," James reminded them. "The both of you may remain here, if you cannot cease your squabbling, but I am going in to search the south drawing room." "I'll go first," Caroline announced, "since I know the way." "You'll go behind me," Blake contradicted, "and give me directions as we go along." "Oh, for the love of Saint Peter," James finally burst out, exasperation showing in every line of his body. "I'll go first, if only to shut the two of you up. Caroline, you follow and give me directions. Blake, you guard her from the rear.

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.

But we were not orphans, we were children of the world, and we could see what was beautiful in the world, so why would we remain slaves?

England reminds me of a quote I saw on a packet of Swiss Miss instant cocoa mix: 'Like a basket of drinkable kittens, wrapped in a blanket, next to a fireplace.

I wandered for ever about these lovely solitudes, gathering flower after flower . . . singing as I might the wild melodies of the country, or occupied by pleasant day dreams.

You should enjoy the freedom. Sometimes a bit of time helps you see what matters.

Hurt can make you blind to the truth

It's not like you can just stop loving someone overnight

The path has a cottage garden on both sides; clumps of old-fashioned flowers ran all over each other: lamb's ear, mint, & rhubarb, roses, forget-me-nots, bleeding hearts & wisteria. I walked very slowly, savoring. At the end of the slate path was the house, very recognizable now... "As nearly perfect a little place as I ever lived in" is how Beatrix described it.

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane’s time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself—all those turn out to be as important to a child’s development as all but the most basic food and shelter.

Harry tries to smile, tries to pretend he's excited for the reasons they would be excited. Not for a different reason. Not because he's in love with Death, and keen to chase him across the French countryside.

There isn't a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world's largest park, its most perfect accidental garden.

Närpes is famous as Finland's tomato capital, and the countryside is dotted with greenhouses to prove it. The flat rural landscape is lovely – if uniform – and it's worth a stop for good eating and fascinating local culture.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

She thought of the past that was both near and distant at the same time, undoubtedly because of the grim intrusion of the war. She pictured her husband, a heavy, bored man, interested only in money, land and local politics. She had never loved him; she had married him because her father wished it. Born and brought up in the countryside, she had little experience of the outside world, with the exception of a few brief trips to Paris to visit an elderly relative.

Giacomo was walking as usual but with an additional bounce in his step for he was after all going over to Delilah Gange’s house, hers was the best and the poshest of the village yet her disposition was kind and of humility yet polished and admirable.

The rose- petalled, gaunt and veined fingers met the shorter and calloused ones, and the hands of fate went to work at making the beauty of the current surceasing interlude outweigh the consequences and shroud the disillusionment of any adoration in eventuality with oblivion.

For the goldfish loved Pins as dearly as he loved her, and the two of them had been friends for a very long time, since he had carried her across a great desert in a plastic bag and had fought Djinn and Ifrits and Ghouls for her. She would have gone anywhere with him, but since he had chosen to settle at Castle Hangnail, she had been more than happy to swim in her bowl and look out over the countryside from the window. (Which only goes to show that even minions have their own stories that may be long and heroic and have no bearing on the story at hand.)

From the middle of a tomb whose lights burn only for survival…our tired bodies finally understand and obey our beating hearts. Meet me in the country, Meet me in the country, The city's breath is getting way too evil to breathe. Meet us in the country, Leave the pigs and rats in the city— Under the gypsy sun, we all will clearly reach the grace of living—…to give and receive with love and ease. We'll dance to the drums of the open life… love is the rhythm of man and wife… faith in the beat for everyone. God breathes music…through the life of the Gypsy Sun…

replied. “Back to that first moment I knew I loved you, the first time you beat me during our sword fighting lessons.” “It was raining,” she remembered. “You stood there, hair wet, water dripping everywhere, staring at me, confused and triumphant... You were an avalanche.” After five years they had grown used to kissing with the cloth mask in the way. He smelled the sweat of her busy afternoon on it. “I remember those old days...” His fingers were in her hair now. “I, bored and frustrated in the countryside, and you, proud and eager, but rough around the edges...” “I

The part of the Lake District that Beatrix Potter chose as her own was not only physically beautiful, it was a place in which she felt emotionally rooted as a descendant of hard-working north-country folk. The predictable routines of farm life appealed to her. There was a realism in the countryside that nurtured a deep connection. The scale of the villages was manageable. Yet the vast desolateness of the surrounding fells was awe-inspiring. It was mysterious, but easily imbued with fantasy and tamed by imagination. The sheltered lakes and fertile valleys satisfied her love of the pastoral. The hill farms and the sheep on the high fells demanded accountability. There was a longing in Beatrix Potter for association with permanence: to find a place where time moved slowly, where places remained much as she remembered them from season to season and from year to year.

Beautiful and perhaps the most beautiful of the land though Bellatrix Garden was, an alluring enchantress owning up to her name to the most beautiful that France had to offer, what was surplus in exquisite splendour was compensated for by negate of intellect and mere existence of a hedonistic tendency.

One of the remarkable things about Life After Life is the way that this formal experimentation is combined with a consistently involving plot. It is as if the writing of B. S. Johnson had been crossed with the better novels of Anthony Trollope. An entire world emerges but shows itself again and again in different lights. It’s an unusual book in many ways: in part a tribute to England and to the resilience of the English character revealed under the stress of wartime; in part a book about love that doesn’t contain a love story but instead celebrates the bond between siblings. It’s a book full of horror vividly described, as in the repeated image of a dress with human arms still inside it, seen in a bombed building. Yet the most memorable passages are those which describe the prewar English countryside before suburbia encroached upon “the flowers that grew in the meadow beyond the copse—flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and oxeye daisies.” Above all, it’s a book about the act of reading itself. As you read it, it asks you to think about your expectations of plot and outcome. The reader desires happiness for certain characters, and Atkinson both challenges and rewards that tendency.

I love so many books and authors that it's hard to name just a few, but I'm always particularly excited when new books by Alice Hoffman, John Crowley, Joanne Harris, Elizabeth Knox, and Patricia McKillip come out. (And, of course, books by Ellen [Kushner], and Holly [Black], and the rest of the Bordertown crew!) I'm impatiently looking forward to Susanna Clarke's next book too. Aside from writing and reading, my favorite things to do are paint, walk in the countryside with my dog, and listen to music -- especially when it's live and it's played by friends. Fortunately there's a lot of live music where I live.

My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime. That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister. And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you. When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true. We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.

Outside, the trees and hedgerows were displaying the colours of autumn in a rainbow of browns, greens, yellows, golds and reds. The smoke, dust and dirt of London had been left far behind. He loved this time of year in the English countryside, when the air had a freshness, a clarity far removed from the brown fogs and clamour

WHAT about the men who run about the countryside painting signs that say “Jesus saves” and “Prepare to meet God!” Have you ever seen one of them? I have not, but I often try to imagine them, and I wonder what goes on in their minds. Strangely, their signs do not make me think of Jesus, but of them. Or perhaps it is “their Jesus” who gets in the way and makes all thought of Jesus impossible. They wish to force their Jesus upon us, and He is perhaps only a projection of themselves. They seem to be at times threatening the world with judgment and at other times promising it mercy. But are they asking simply to be loved and recognized and valued, for themselves?

Like true country people, they loved watching the countryside change with the seasons. They savored the trees turning green in the spring. They saw the summer flowers blossom, fade, and drop. They exclaimed over the autumn colors, gold and red and rust. They watched the leaves fall, and the fields turn sere, to be purified by winter. The wheel of the year turned once, twice, three times.

Nothing - and I mean, really, absolutely nothing - is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilised - more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railway lines - and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent.

The New Man was not the victor, loud-mouthed and vain, but the man who was humble and solemn, with the beautiful eyes of a terrified animal. And so through the eyes of these lovers—because even married couples became lovers again with the danger of the front hanging over them—I learned to see the countryside, the flowers on the tables, the children at play, and to see that every hour is a sacrament.

Then all of a sudden, one lovely night, Stalin reconsidered. Why? Maybe we will never know. Did he perhaps wish to save his soul? Too soon for that, it would seem. Did his sense of humor come to the fore—was it all so deadly, monotonous, so bitter-tasting? But no one would ever dare accuse Stalin of having a sense of humor! Likeliest of all, Stalin simply figured out that the whole countryside, not just 200,000 people, would soon die of famine anyway, so why go to the trouble? And instantly the whole TKP trial was called off. All those who had "confessed" were told they could repudiate their confessions (one can picture their happiness!). And instead of the whole big catch, only the small group of Kondratyev and Chayanov was hauled in and tried. 24 (In 1941, the charge against the tortured Vavilov was that the TKP had existed and he had been its head.)

Up before sunrise. Marjorie hated getting out of bed in the dark, but loved the payoff once she was dressed and rolling down the country roads in the first light, cruising and owning them almost alone. The countryside here used to be a lot more interesting, though. She remembered it in her girlhood - orchards, small ranches, farmhouses, each one of these houses a distinct personality... Money, she thought wryly, scanning the endless miles of grapevines, all identically wired and braced and drip-lined, mile after mile - money was such a powerful organizer. As the dawn light gained strength, and bathed the endless vines in tarnished silver, it struck her that there was, after all, something scary about money, that it could run loose in the world like a mythic monster, gobbling up houses and trees, serving strictly its own monstrous appetite. ("The Growlimb")

In spite of the years, Pushkin tells us, Tatyana remains in love with Onegin. Now, finally, she has a real chance to be with him. So, what does Tatyana do? Does she ditch her husband and elope with her true love? Nyet, she doesn’t. In the culminating scenes of Pushkin’s long poem, Tatyana decides to stick with her husband and, in her own nineteenth-century way, tells Onegin to fuck off. A simple love story which most Russians know by heart. Many are even able to recite entire chapters – ‘ya k vam pishu’, Tatyana’s letter, being an especially popular passage. The symbolism of the story should not be ignored. Tatyana, the pure girl from the countryside, embodies the essence of Russianness, while Onegin, the cosmopolitan bon vivant, is a cynical fucker corrupted by modern European values. Onegin’s life is about superficial pleasures. Tatyana’s is all about meaning.

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree.

Ye. Perhaps I have lived with love, not against it. Love is not just a bourgeois romantic notion of finding the one true match who will fill one's soul so full that it brims over and splashes uninterruptedly as if from some eternal pump. Love is also in this life that I've lived here in the countryside. And when I chose this life and pursued it an didn't regret it, I learned that one should stick to one's decision, nurture it and not deviate--that this is an expression of love.

Individually and collectively, we will have to be the resistance—offering daily, bold, defiant pushback against all that feels wrong here. This pushback will come as we loudly and unapologetically speak truth where truth is not welcome. It will come as we connect with one another on social media and in faith communities and in our neighborhoods, and as we work together to demand accountability from our elected officials and pastoral leaders. It will come in the small things: in the art we create and the conversations we have and the quiet gestures of compassion that are barely visible. It will come in the way we fully celebrate daily life: having dinner with friends, driving through the countryside, playing in the yard with our children, laughing at a movie we love. It will come as we use the shared resources of our experience and our talents and our numbers to ensure that our children inherit a world worth being here for. It will come as we transform our grief into goodness.

I remember the air outside being redolent of farmyards, proper rural smells, but also the fresh, clean scent of the countryside, and that I was fascinated by the well fifty yards beyond the garage, which always seemed to produce fresh water. I can still conjure in my mind the outdoor fragrance of my grandfather’s clothes – I used to love pressing my nose into the folds of his coat, immersing myself in all it represented. It was a simple house, defined by simple things, but no less profound for that.

I asked myself, What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person? And then I saw the curtains blowing wildly, and outside the rain was falling harder, causing everyone to scurry and shout. I smiled. And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried the water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside. It caused me to yelp and dance. I wiped my eyes and looked in the mirror. I was surprised at what I saw. I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered those thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself. I would always remember my parent's wishes, but I would never forget myself

You know (to adopt the easy or conversational style) that you and I belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us greater pleasure than to stand under lonely skies in forest clearings, or to find a beach looking westward at evening over unfrequented seas. But the great mass of men love companionship so much that nothing seems of any worth compared with it. Human communion is their meat and drink, and so they use the railways to make bigger and bigger hives for themselves.

There was never a threat of things going too far when we were fake. But I see now how fast things can change without you even realizing it. It can go from a kiss to hands under my shirt in two seconds, and it’s so feverish, so frenzied. It’s like we’re on a high-speed train that’s going somewhere fast, and I like it, I do, but I also like a slow train where I can look out the window and appreciate the countryside, the buildings, the mountains. It’s like I don’t want to miss the little steps; I want it to last. And then the next second I want to grow up faster, more, now. To be as ready as everyone else is. How is everyone else so ready? I still find it very surprising, having a boy in my personal space. I still get nervous when he puts his arm around my waist or reaches for my hand. I don’t think I know how to date in the 2010s. I’m confused by it. I don’t want what Margot and Josh had, or Peter and Genevieve. I want something different. I guess you could call me a late bloomer, but that implies that we’re all on some predetermined blooming schedule, that there’s a right or a wrong way to be sixteen and in love with a boy. My body is a temple not just any boy gets to worship at. I won’t do any more than I want to do.

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk.

It’s a long story,” he said, taking a sip of Mr. Braeburn’s whiskey, “so I will tell only a very condensed version of it. “Mrs. Marsden and I grew up on adjacent properties in the Cotswold. But the Cotswold, as fair as it is, plays almost no part in this tale. Because it was not in the green, unpolluted countryside that we fell in love, but in gray, sooty London. Love at first sight, of course, a hunger of the soul that could not be denied.” Bryony trembled somewhere inside. This was not their story, but her story, the determined spinster felled by the magnificence and charm of the gorgeous young thing. He glanced at her. “You were the moon of my existence; your moods dictated the tides of my heart.” The tides of her own heart surged at his words, even though his words were nothing but lies. “I don’t believe I had moods,” she said severely. “No, of course not. ‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate’—and the tides of my heart only rose ever higher to crash against the levee of my self-possession. For I loved you most intemperately, my dear Mrs. Marsden.” Beside her Mrs. Braeburn blushed, her eyes bright. Bryony was furious at Leo, for his facile words, and even more so at herself, for the painful pleasure that trickled into her drop by drop. “Our wedding was the happiest hour of my life, that we would belong to each other always. The church was filled with hyacinths and camellias, and the crowd overflowed to the steps, for the whole world wanted to see who had at last captured your lofty heart. “But alas, I had not truly captured your lofty heart, had I? I but held it for a moment. And soon there was trouble in Paradise. One day, you said to me, ‘My hair has turned white. It is a sign I must wander far and away. Find me then, if you can. Then and only then will I be yours again.’” Her heart pounded again. How did he know that she had indeed taken her hair turning white as a sign that the time had come for her to leave? No, he did not know. He’d made it up out of whole cloth. But even Mr. Braeburn was spellbound by this ridiculous tale. She had forgotten how hypnotic Leo could be, when he wished to beguile a crowd. “And so I have searched. From the poles to the tropics, from the shores of China to the shores of Nova Scotia. Our wedding photograph in hand, I have asked crowds pale, red, brown, and black, ‘I seek an English lady doctor, my lost beloved. Have you seen her?’” He looked into her eyes, and she could not look away, as mesmerized as the hapless Braeburns. “And now I have found you at last.” He raised his glass. “To the beginning of the rest of our lives.

But China’s mandatory household registration system, the hukou, presents a significant barrier for this type of match. Citizens from the countryside are not allowed to move to urban areas without state approval. The prospect of more desirable employment lures many to cities anyway, but even if they find a good job, they are barred from accessing urban health care, education, and housing benefits. And since children inherit their mother’s hukou status, no self-respecting urban bachelor wants to marry a poor girl from the sticks—unless they are truly in love, and in which case, everyone lives happily ever after. Except for the woman and her children, who, because of their hukou, are essentially illegal aliens in their own country.

But Eugene was untroubled by thought of a goal. He was mad with such ecstasy as he had never known. He was a centaur, moon-eyed and wild of name, torn apart with hunger for the golden world. He became at times almost incapable of coherent speech. While talking with people, he would whinny suddenly into their startled faces, and leap away, his face contorted with an idiot joy. He would hurl himself squealing through the streets and along the paths, touched with the ecstasy of a thousand unspoken desires. The world lay before him for his picking—full of opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die. He went back to Pulpit Hill for two or three days of delightful loneliness in the deserted college. He prowled through the empty campus at midnight under the great moons of the late rich Spring; he breathed the thousand rich odours of tree and grass and flower, of the opulent and seductive South; and he felt a delicious sadness when he thought of his departure, and saw there in the moon the thousand phantom shapes of the boys he had known who would come no more. He still loitered, although his baggage had been packed for days. With a desperate pain, he faced departure from that Arcadian wilderness where he had known so much joy. At night he roamed the deserted campus, talking quietly until morning with a handful of students who lingered strangely, as he did, among the ghostly buildings, among the phantoms of lost boys. He could not face a final departure. He said he would return early in autumn for a few days, and at least once a year thereafter. Then one hot morning, on sudden impulse, he left. As the car that was taking him to Exeter roared down the winding street, under the hot green leafiness of June, he heard, as from the sea-depth of a dream, far-faint, the mellow booming of the campus bell. And suddenly it seemed to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the footfalls of lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. Then, as he listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners thudded into oblivion. The car roared up across the lip of the hill, and drove steeply down into the hot parched countryside below. As the lost world faded from his sight, Eugene gave a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the elfin door had closed behind him, and that he would never come back again. He saw the vast rich body of the hills, lush with billowing greenery, ripe-bosomed, dappled by far-floating cloudshadows. But it was, he knew, the end. Far-forested, the horn-note wound. He was wild with the hunger for release: the vast champaign of earth stretched out for him its limitless seduction. It was the end, the end. It was the beginning of the voyage, the quest of new lands. Gant was dead. Gant was living, death-in-life. In

Even if we don't have a special person in our lives we still all love a lot. We love feelings, tastes, sights and sounds. We love the villages, countryside, sprawling cities and towns, We love a sunrise and a sunset, a full moon, a starry night, a cloudy day, the wind on our face and through our hair, we love the rain. From the hot sun on our back on a mid summers day to the first crisp frost of winter. We love a book, or a movie, a song or symphony. Thoseuunafraid of love will be rewarded and see romance in all manner of places. Love is truly all around, not merely the exclusive feeling between lovers and families, or even between friends. We love a lot and we should always be able to love freely and without fear. To love with all our hearts ability.

It began with a train journey. I always thought something brilliant might happen to me on a train. The transitional state of a long journey has always seemed to me the most romantic and magical of places to find yourself in; marooned in a cozy pod of your own thoughts, suspended in midair, traveling through a wad of silent, blank pages between two chapters. A place where phones dip in and out of consciousness and you're forced to spend time with your thoughts, working out what needs to be reshaped and reordered. I have done big dreaming while sitting on trains. The clearest moments of epiphany or gratitude have hit me when zooming through unidentifiable English countryside, staring out at a golden rapeseed field, considering what I am leaving behind or about to approach.

Though I was now in ill health and did not go out alone, and though I might never aspire to making love with them, it still gladdened me to know this, as though I were a child who, having been born in prison or a hospital, and having come to believe that the human organism can digest nothing but dry bread and medicines, suddenly learns that peaches, apricots, and grapes are not just pretty things that grow in the countryside, but mouth-watering delicacies on which one may feed. Even though the jailer or the nurse may prevent him from picking such fine fruit, the world seems a better place, and life itself more worth living. Any desire we may feel seems to us a finer thing, and we have an impression of it as a more reliable thing, when we know that external reality is in conformity with it, even if its fulfillment remains out of our personal reach.

is, of course, in Juvenal’s nature to mock everything. Ordinary people might hate the city and love the country, or they might feel the opposite way. It takes the spleen of Juvenal to loathe the city over several hundred lines of verse, and then mock the only alternative he offers. It is a very urban cynicism, and perhaps that is what the city really offers. A sense of having seen and done it all. Sophistication or jadedness, depending on one’s perspective. If the construct of the countryside is a charming, small-scale, olde-worlde innocence that it doesn’t really possess, then the city is also as much myth as it is reality. The construct of cities is that they are the only places where dangerous, important, society-changing things can happen. Governments sit, law courts judge, traders sell, thugs maraud, all of humanity eventually jostles each other in a city.

It is, of course, in Juvenal’s nature to mock everything. Ordinary people might hate the city and love the country, or they might feel the opposite way. It takes the spleen of Juvenal to loathe the city over several hundred lines of verse, and then mock the only alternative he offers. It is a very urban cynicism, and perhaps that is what the city really offers. A sense of having seen and done it all. Sophistication or jadedness, depending on one’s perspective. If the construct of the countryside is a charming, small-scale, olde-worlde innocence that it doesn’t really possess, then the city is also as much myth as it is reality. The construct of cities is that they are the only places where dangerous, important, society-changing things can happen. Governments sit, law courts judge, traders sell, thugs maraud, all of humanity eventually jostles each other in a city.

My name is Claudine, I live in Montigny; I was born there in 1884; I shall probably not die there. My Manual of Departmental Geography expresses itself thus: "Montigny-en-Fresnois, a pretty little town of l, 950 inhabitants, built in tiers above the Thaize; its well-preserved Saracen tower is worthy of note .... "Tome, those descriptions are totally meaningless! To begin with, the Thaize doesn't exist. Of course I know it's supposed to run through the meadows under the level-crossing but you won't find enough water there in any season to give a sparrow a foot-bath. Montigny "built in tiers"? No, that's not how I see it; to my mind, the houses just tumble haphazard from the top of the hill to the bottom of the valley. They rise one above the other, like a staircase, leading up to a big chateau that was rebuilt under Louis XV and is already more dilapidated than the squat, ivy-sheathed Saracen tower that crumbles away from the top a trifle more every day. Montigny is a village, not a town: its streets, thank heaven, are not paved; the showers roll down them in little torrents that dry up in a couple of hours; it is a village, not even a very pretty village, but, all the same, I adore it. The charm, the delight of this countryside composed of hills and of valleys so narrow that some are ravines, lies in the woods-the deep, encroaching woods that ripple and wave away into the distance as far as you can see .... Green meadows make rifts in them here and there, so do little patches of cultivation. But these do not amount to much, for the magnificent woods devour everything. As a result, this lovely region is atrociously poor and its few scattered farms provide just the requisite number of red roofs to set off the velvety green of the woods. Dear woods! I know them all; I've scoured them so often. (...)

When Sam and I were living in Australia, one winter weekend we rented a cottage in the countryside. We toured local wineries by day and at sunset we wrapped ourselves up in blankets on the porch overlooking the valley below, tucking into our bounty of wine and local cheese. I can’t remember who initiated it (OK, fine, probably me), but we decided that during this magic hour while day turned to night we could ask each other anything. This moment in our relationship changed everything. I got to ask all my questions and so did Sam. We also had to answer them. I think for both of us it’s the night we tipped over from infatuation to falling in love. Even now, the phrase ‘wine and cheese hour’ is shorthand for this safe space, when we need to sit down and reconnect. This is so bougie and painful to admit, especially because I don’t even like wine and this is now far more likely to be ‘coffee and Jaffa cake hour’. (Vodka and Pringles works, too.)

At all times and in all places, in season and out of season, time is now and England, place is now and England; past and present inter-penetrate. The best days an angler spends upon his river – the river which is Heraclitus’ river, which is never the same as the angler is never the same, yet is the same always – are those he recollects in tranquillity, as wintry weather lashes the land without, and he, snug and warm, ties new patterns of dry-fly, and remembers the leaf-dapple upon clear water and the play of light and the eternal dance of ranunculus in the chalk-stream. A cricket match between two riotously inexpert village Second XIs is no less an instance of timeless, of time caught in ritual within an emerald Arcadia, than is a Test at Lord’s, and we who love the greatest of games know that we do indeed catch a fleeting glimpse of a spectral twelfth man on every pitch, for in each re-enactment of the mystery there is the cumulation of all that has gone before and shall come after. Et ego in Arcadia.

traditional tales are neither so simplistic nor so predictable. They give generous space to the subaltern voice: to the powerless, to the poor, to girls and wives, even to animals, all those creatures who need to find ways not only to survive in this difficult world, but to live well in it, despite the dark forces ranged against them. These stories compel, seizing our attention with their strangeness while at the same time speaking clearly to shared themes of human existence. They explore huge questions: of love and loss, and of the conditions under which we do our everyday work and how we might thrive in it. They patrol the shadowy borderlands between life and death and they tease out our hopes and fears for our children. They demand we consider issues such as migration, asking who belongs here, who can make a home here, who can find the strength to begin all over again in a strange new land – and who might have been here for much longer than you think. Folktales pick fights about disability and aging, about women and men, and, crucially, they hold out to us the environments in which we live – our much-loved British countryside – and show how it might slip through our fingers.

There once was a female snake that roamed around a small village in the countryside of Egypt. She was commonly seen by villagers with her small baby as they grazed around the trees. One day, several men noticed the mother snake was searching back and forth throughout the village in a frenzy — without her young. Apparently, her baby had slithered off on its own to play while she was out looking for food. Yet the mother snake went on looking for her baby for days because it still hadn't returned back to her. So one day, one of the elder women in the village caught sight of the big snake climbing on top of their water supply — an open clay jug harvesting all the village's water. The snake latched its teeth on the big jug's opening and sprayed its venom into it. The woman who witnessed the event was mentally handicapped, so when she went to warn the other villagers, nobody really understood what she was saying. And when she approached the jug to try to knock it over, she was reprimanded by her two brothers and they locked her away in her room. Then early the next day, the mother snake returned to the village after a long evening searching for her baby. The children villagers quickly surrounded her while clapping and singing because she had finally found her baby. And as the mother snake watched the children rejoice in the reunion with her child, she suddenly took off straight for the water supply — leaving behind her baby with the villagers' children. Before an old man could gather some water to make some tea, she hissed in his direction, forcing him to step back as she immediately wrapped herself around the jug and squeezed it super hard. When the jug broke burst into a hundred fragments, she slithered away to gather her child and return to the safety of her hole. Many people reading this true story may not understand that the same feelings we are capable of having, snakes have too. Thinking the villagers killed her baby, the mother snake sought out revenge by poisoning the water to destroy those she thought had hurt her child. But when she found her baby and saw the villagers' children, her guilt and protective instincts urged her to save them before other mothers would be forced to experience the pain and grief of losing a child. Animals have hearts and minds too. They are capable of love, hatred, jealousy, revenge, hunger, fear, joy, and caring for their own and others. We look at animals as if they are inferior because they are savage and not civilized, but in truth, we are the ones who are not being civil by drawing a thick line between us and them — us and nature. A wild animal's life is very straightforward. They spend their time searching and gathering food, mating, building homes, and meditating and playing with their loved ones. They enjoy the simplicity of life without any of our technological gadgetry, materialism, mass consumption, wastefulness, superficiality, mindless wars, excessive greed and hatred. While we get excited by the vibrations coming from our TV sets, headphones and car stereos, they get stimulated by the vibrations of nature. So, just because animals may lack the sophisticated minds to create the technology we do or make brick homes and highways like us, does not mean their connections to the etheric world isn't more sophisticated than anything we could ever imagine. That means they are more spiritual, reflective, cosmic, and tuned into alternate universes beyond what our eyes can see. So in other words, animals are more advanced than us. They have the simple beauty we lack and the spiritual contentment we may never achieve.

Nothing—and I mean really, absolutely nothing—is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized—more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railroad tracks—and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time, and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily-spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply-hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 88,386 square miles the world has ever known—almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

They seemed so right together-both of them sophisticated, dark-haired, and striking; no doubt they had much in common, she thought a little dismally as she picked up her knife and fork and went to work on her lobster. Beside her, Lord Howard leaned close and teased, “It’s dead, you know.” Elizabeth glanced blankly at him, and he nodded to the lobster she was still sawing needlessly upon. “It’s dead,” he repeated. “There’s no need to try to kill it twice.” Mortified, Elizabeth smiled and sighed and thereafter made an all-out effort to ingratiate herself with the rest of the party at their table. As Lord Howard had forewarned the gentlemen, who by now had all seen or heard about her escapade in the card room, were noticeably cooler, and so Elizabeth tried ever harder to be her most engaging self. It was only the second time in her life she’d actually used the feminine wiles she was born with-the first time being her first encounter with Ian Thornton in the garden-and she was a little amazed by her easy success. One by one the men at the table unbent enough to talk and laugh with her. During that long, trying hour Elizabeth repeatedly had the strange feeling that Ian was watching her, and toward the end, when she could endure it no longer, she did glance at the place where he was seated. His narrowed amber eyes were leveled on her face, and Elizabeth couldn’t tell whether he disapproved of this flirtatious side of her or whether he was puzzled by it. “Would you permit me to offer to stand in for my cousin tomorrow,” Lord Howard said as the endless meal came to an end and the guests began to arise, “and escort you to the village?” It was the moment of reckoning, the moment when Elizabeth had to decide whether she was going to meet Ian at the cottage or not. Actually, there was no real decision to make, and she knew it. With a bright, artificial smile Elizabeth said, “Thank you.” “We’re to leave at half past ten, and I understand there are to be the usual entertainments-sopping and a late luncheon at the local inn, followed by a ride to enjoy the various prospects of the local countryside.” It sounded horribly dull to Elizabeth at that moment. “It sounds lovely,” she exclaimed with such fervor that Lord Howard shot her a startled look. “Are you feeling well?” he asked, his worried gaze taking in her flushed cheeks and overbright eyes. “I’ve never felt better,” she said, her mind on getting away-upstairs to the sanity and quiet of her bedchamber. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have the headache and should like to retire,” she said, leaving behind her a baffled Lord Howard. She was partway up the stairs before it dawned on her what she’d actually said. She stopped in midstep, then gave her head a shake and slowly continued on. She didn’t particularly care what Lord Howard-her fiance’s own cousin-thought. And she was too miserable to stop and consider how very odd that was.

I’d never been with anyone like Marlboro Man. He was attentive--the polar opposite of aloof--and after my eighteenth-month-long college relationship with my freshman love Collin, whose interest in me had been hampered by his then-unacknowledged sexual orientation, and my four-year run with less-than-affectionate J, attentive was just the drug I needed. Not a day passed that Marlboro Man--my new cowboy love--didn’t call to say he was thinking of me, or he missed me already, or he couldn’t wait to see me again. Oh, the beautiful, unbridled honesty. We loved taking drives together. He knew every inch of the countryside: every fork in the road, every cattle guard, every fence, every acre. Ranchers know the country around them. They know who owns this pasture, who leases that one, whose land this county road passes through, whose cattle are on the road by the lake. It all looked the same to me, but I didn’t care. I’d never been more content to ride in the passenger seat of a crew-cab pickup in all my life. I’d never ridden in a crew-cab pickup in all my life. Never once. In fact, I’d never personally known anyone who’d driven a pickup; the boys from my high school who drove pickups weren’t part of my scene, and in their spare time they were needed at home to contribute to the family business. Either that, or they were cowboy wannabes--the kind that only wore cowboy hats to bars--and that wasn’t really my type either. For whatever reason, pickup trucks and I had never once crossed paths. And now, with all the time I was spending with Marlboro Man, I practically lived in one.

If, in the further reaches of some or another remote corridor in an immense house of two or, perhaps, three storeys, and behind some or another door that remains mostly closed but in sight of a window overlooking some or another tract of far-reaching landscape of mostly level grassy countryside with low hills or a line of trees in the distance, a certain man at his desk, on some or another day of sunshine with scattered clouds, were to spurn the predictable words and phrases of the many writers of fiction who have reported of this or that male character that he once fell in love with this or that female character, and if that same man, after striving as neither I, the author of this sentence, nor even the most discerning reader of the sentence, have or has striven nor will ever strive, in late afternoon, and at about the time when the rays of the declining sun might have caused the pane in the window of his room to seem to a traveller on a distant road like a spot of golden oil, had found in his heart, or wherever such things are to be found, the words best fitted to suggest what he seemed to have felt long before, on a certain hot afternoon, in a distant inland city, and whether he had simply kept those words in mind or whether he had actually written them, either as notes for a work of fiction that he might one day write or as part of an actual work of fiction, then I do not doubt that the words would have been to the effect that a certain boy, a mere child, while he watched unobserved a certain girl, a mere child, whose name he did not know and who had almost certainly never had sight of him, wished for the means to inform her that he was worthy of trust.

After dinner, as we had so many times during our months and months together, Marlboro Man and I adjourned to his porch. It was dark--we’d eaten late--and despite my silent five-minute battle with the reality of my reproductive system, there was definitely something special about the night. I stood at the railing, breathing in the dewy night air and taking in all the sounds of the countryside that would one day be my home. The pumping of a distant oil well, the symphony of crickets, the occasional moo of a mama cow, the manic yipping of coyotes…the din of country life was as present and reassuring as the cacophony of car horns, traffic sounds, and sirens had been in L.A. I loved everything about it. He appeared behind me; his strong arms wrapped around my waist. Oh, it was real, all right--he was real. As I touched his forearms and ran the palms of my hands from his elbows down to his wrists, I’d never been more sure of how very real he was. Here, grasping me in his arms, was the Adonis of all the romance-novel fantasies I clearly never realized I’d been having; they’d been playing themselves out in steamy detail under the surface of my consciousness, and I never even knew I’d been missing it. I closed my eyes and rested my head back on his chest, just as his impossibly soft lips and subtle whiskers rested on my neck. Romancewise, it was perfection--the night air was still--almost imperceptible. Physically, viscerally, it was almost more than I could stand. Six babies? Sure. How ’bout seven? Is that enough? Standing there that night, I would have said eight, nine, ten. And I could have gotten started right away. But getting started would have to wait. There’d be plenty of time for that. For that night, that dark, perfect night, we simply stayed on the porch and locked ourselves in kiss after beautiful, steamy kiss. And before too long, it was impossible to tell where his arms ended and where my body began.

How come I wasn’t riding around in his middle seat? Was I supposed to initiate this? Was this expected of me? Because I probably should know early on. But wouldn’t he have gestured in that direction if he’d wanted me to move over and sit next to him? Maybe, just maybe, he’d liked those girls better than he liked me. Maybe they’d had a closeness that warranted their riding side by side in a pickup, a closeness that he and I just don’t share? Please don’t let that be the reason. I don’t like that reason. I had to ask him. I had to know. “Can I ask you something?” I said as we drove down the road separating a neighboring ranch from his. “Sure,” Marlboro Man answered. He reached over and touched my knee. “Did you ever used to drive around in your pickup with a girl sitting in the middle seat right next to you?” I tried not to sound accusatory. A grin formed in the corner of Marlboro Man’s mouth. “Sure I did,” he said. His hand was still on my knee. “Why?” “Oh, no reason. I was just curious,” I said. I wanted to leave it at that. “What made you think of that?” he said. “Oh, I was really just curious,” I repeated. “Growing up, I’d sometimes see boys and girls riding right next to each other in pickups, and I just wondered if you ever did. That’s all.” I stopped short of telling him I never understood the whole thing or asking him why he loved Julie more than me. “Yep. I did,” he said. I looked out the window and thought for a minute. What am I? Chopped liver? Is there some specific reason he never pulls me over close to him as we drive around the countryside? Why doesn’t he hook his right arm affectionately around my neck and claim me as the woman of his pickup? I never knew I had such a yearning to ride next to a man in a pickup, but apparently it had been a suppressed lifelong dream I knew nothing about. Suddenly, sitting in that pickup with Marlboro Man, I’d apparently never wanted anything so badly in my life.

8 THE JOURNEY TO Skoda took three days, for the company traveled warily. Acuas told Decado that following the slaying of the soldiers, the Delnoch fortress commander had sent patrols throughout Skultik and the surrounding countryside, while to the south legion riders scouted the lands for rebels. Tenaka took time to speak with the leaders of the Thirty, for despite the many legends, he knew little of their order. According to the stories, the Thirty were semigods with awesome powers who chose to die in wars against evil. The last time they had appeared had been at Dros Delnoch, when the albino Serbitar had stood beside the Earl of Bronze and defied the hordes of Ulric, the greatest Nadir warlord of all time. But though Tenaka questioned the leaders, he learned little. They were courteous and polite—even distantly friendly—but their answers floated above his head like clouds beyond the grasp of common men. Decado was no different; he would merely smile and change the subject. Tenaka was not a religious man, yet he felt ill at ease among these warrior-priests and his mind constantly returned to the words of the blind seeker. “Of gold and ice and shadow …” The man had predicted that the trio would come together. And they had. He had also foreseen the danger of the Templars. On the first night of their journey Tenaka approached the elderly Abaddon, and the two walked away from the fire together. “I saw you in Skultik,” said Tenaka. “You were being attacked by a Joining.” “Yes. I apologize for the deceit.” “What was the reason for it?” “It was a test, my son. But not merely of you—of ourselves.” “I do not understand,” said Tenaka. “It is not necessary that you should. Do not fear us, Tenaka. We are here to help you in whatever way we can.” “Why?” “Because it serves the Source.” “Can you not answer me without religious riddles? You are men. What do you gain from this war?” “Nothing in this world.” “You know why I came here?” “Yes, my son. To purge your mind of guilt and grief, to drown it in Ceska’s blood.” “And now?” “Now you are caught up in forces beyond your control. Your grief is assuaged by your love for Renya, but the guilt remains. You did not obey the call—you left your friends to be butchered by the Joinings of Ceska. You ask yourself if it would have been different had you come. Could you have defeated the Joinings? You torment yourself thus.” “Could I have defeated the Joinings?” “No,

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.