day after day, day after still day

As this mostly dreary summer seeks to belie its dimming through a series of perfect days that can't quite hide the coming fall, a fragment from a Transylvanian idyll, long ago:

"The summer solstice was past, peonies and lilac had both vanished, cuckoos had changed their tune and were making ready to fly.  Roast corn-cobs came and trout from the mountains; cherries, then strawberries, apricots and peaches, and finally, wonderful melons and raspberries.  The scarlet blaze of paprika--there were two kinds on the table, one of them fierce as gunpowder--was cooled by cucumber cut thin as muslin and by soda splashed into glasses of wine already afloat with ice; this had been fetched from an igloo-like undercroft among the trees where prudent hands had stacked it six months before when--it was impossible to imagine it!--snow covered all.  Waggons creaked under loads of apricots, yet the trees were still laden; they scattered the dust, wasps tunnelled them and wheels and foot-falls flattened them to a yellow pulp; tall wooden vats bubbled among the dusty sunflowers, filling the yards with the sweet and heady smell of their fermentation; and soon, even at midday, the newly distilled spirit began to bowl the peasants over like a sniper, flinging the harvesters prostrate and prone in every fragment of shadow.  They snored among sheaves and hay-cocks and a mantle of flies covered them while the flocks crammed together under every spread of branches, and not a leaf moved."

--Patrick Leigh Fermor

Comments

[M.W.Nolden]

Very, very nice…

[JL]

Glad you liked it. I had entered it in back in July, I think, when I read Between the Woods and the Water (and its predecessor, A Time of Gifts), intending to write a post about them. Well, you know how that goes--the closest I came to doing it was making a comment over at Franklin's, and then time passed. As it happens, my opinion of the second book rose considerably as I finished it, which was to be past of the topic of my post; but since I never completed it, I thought I might at least put the quote to good use.

[Bunny Smedley]

On a whim I bought 'In Tearing Haste' last spring - mostly because I was waiting for a friend in a bookshop cafe and needed something to read in order not to feel self-conscious in that 'here I am, waiting for someone' way, but also slightly because the Deborah Devonshire who turns up in James Lees-Milne's diaries came across as entertaining company. The book turned out to be a success, too, largely due to the fruitful contrasts between the two correspondents - their prose, their lives, their motivations in writing to one another.

But it also exposed the alarming fact that I'd never previously read a word by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Faced with such a long back-catalogue, where to start? 'In Time of Gifts' would seem to be the answer. Thanks!

[Fabrizio Van Marciano]

Very good, leaves your imagination creating images as the words unfold. Well written too, nice one thanks for sharing it.