The Silver Eel

"A gape-jawed serpentine shape of pale metal crested with soot hung high for a sign."

Saturday, June 17, 2006

ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG

"Youth is a time of melancholy."
- Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

"By the time you're nineteen you have a pretty good idea of some of the things you're not going to be; but more often, this sense of one's limitations, the really penetrating understanding, happens in late youth or early middle age."
- Raymond Carver, 'John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher', in Call If You Need Me

4 Comments:

At 19 June 2006 at 20:48 , Blogger Joe said...

true - I am only now coming to grips with the fact that I am unlikely to become an interstellar bucanneer.

 
At 20 June 2006 at 10:22 , Blogger Yewtree said...

Hey Joe, I think you'd make a great interstellar buccaneer though.

Isn't the Alexandria Quartet fabulous?

I heartily recommend Prospero's Cell, Lawrence Durrell's book about Corfu.

 
At 20 June 2006 at 23:09 , Blogger The Silver Eel said...

I'm afraid that, despite its reputation for having been almost revolutionary in the 1950s, I have never read the Alexandria Quartet. I only know the quote from reading the first few pages of Balthazar quite a number of years ago, and that one line stuck with me. At the time I found it comforting, and I still think it's true. I do own a copy of Clea because I once knew, rather more vaguely than I wanted to, a girl with the same name, and though I think it's in a box somewhere, it remains unread.

 
At 27 June 2006 at 13:52 , Blogger Yewtree said...

I must admit, I enjoyed the Alexandria Quartet massively at the age of 17/18, but the last time I started it I couldn't get into it. It remains a luminous experience in my memory, though.

 

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