lin·gua·phile |
Graduate student specializing in 18th century British literature with an emphasis on the novel. Lover of John Milton, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte. (Yes, I know none of them published in the 18th century.) Occasional writer of lengthy fictions, seven-time NaNoWriMo participant and former Office of Letters and Light intern. Reader of much young adult and/or fantasy lit. Lifetime lover of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, recently fanatic about Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, blaming it all on Harry Potter. Wanderluster. Left my heart in London, reclaim it bit by bit through tea and Doctor Who and Sherlock and Downton Abbey. |
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Notes"London itself looks best in the dark. It’s a pretty safe city, and you can walk in most places after sunset. It has a sedate and ghostly beauty. In the crepuscular kindness, you can see not just how she is, but how she once was, the layers of lives that have been lived here. Somebody with nothing better to do worked out that for every one of us living today, there are 15 ghosts. In most places you don’t notice them, but in London you do. The dead and the fictional ghosts of Sherlock Holmes and Falstaff, Oliver Twist, Wendy and the Lost Boys, all the kindly, garrulous ghosts that accompany you in the night. The river runs like dark silk through the heart of the city, and the bridges dance with light. There are corners of silence in the revelry of the West End and Soho, and in the inky shadows foxes and owls patrol Hyde Park, which is still illuminated by gaslight."A. A. Gill, in a profile of London for the New York Times
This is the London I know, and love, and miss with every part of me that knows how to miss things. Click the link and read the whole article; it’s worth it.
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Notes[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]2,703 playsNoah and the Whale - Blue Skies
Shit. Scrolling along my dash before bed, lazily not paying attention to most of the posts, and then this comes up. And I just want to cry. I’ve posted this song before. This is my song of leaving London, and everything that place meant to me for the nine months I lived there, and everyone I loved there and everything I learned there about myself and about the books that make me up. This is the song about being older and wiser than your pain, but still feeling it. And maybe, weirdly, it’s affecting me now like it hasn’t in a long time because finally I am actually going back — plane tickets purchased and everything, departure less than two months away — but it’s been two years, and I’m not going back to stay. I can’t imagine myself as a tourist, someone just passing through, but that’s the truth of it, and probably will be for a long time, maybe forever. I want to be a professor. I don’t want to be one in the British university system. These two facts matter to me — sometimes they are the easiest parts of this whole puzzle to define — and they mean that I will not live there again. I have known this for more than two years. I have lived for two years separated by an ocean and most of the width of the American continent from people I care about, but who it’s hard to keep in touch with perfectly, because even with the internet, it just isn’t the same, and I don’t expect it to be but I wish against logic that it could be. I believe, I truly do, in the importance of travel and international friendships and an ethic of an expansive self, a heart left behind in too many places, I believe I am a better human for having known more of the world than my little corner, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean you ever stop missing those things that were part of your life and changed it but aren’t there in the same way anymore.
(via burdge)
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This is the city at the top of my list — the city where I’ll likely never be a resident again, only a visitor — the city around which, nonetheless, so much of my life and my literature revolves — at once a city of ghosts and spectres and hidden things and a city that is vibrantly painfully alive.
If home is where the heart is, then a part of “home” will always be right here.
(Source: fuqit, via the-eyre-affair)
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St. Paul’s Cathedral (it’s behind the daffodil), London; April 2010
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Millennium Bridge and St. Paul’s seen from the Tate Modern, London
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St James Park, London; November 2009
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Notes∞ TOP5 CITIES I WANT TO LIVE IN.
#2. London.I’m sorry. How is this NOT #1? (Granted, I looked up the list and apparently New York is #1…so okay, I can’t really complain.)
(via the-eyre-affair)
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The first time I ever saw snow falling, I was living in London and had been for three months. It was December, the last week of classes for the semester, and I was sitting in my Dickens seminar. The classroom was on the second or third floor of the building and had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto one of the campus’s main courtyards. My professor was talking about Dombey and Son and while I liked the book well enough I got distracted for a moment and looked outside and did a double-take, because it was snowing, real snow, flakes big enough to see them, flurrying about in the air and sticking when they hit the ground.
I’ve seen a fair amount of snow since then — more of it in London, some that same year in Wales and in Ireland, and much more over the past year in New York — but every time I catch the first sight of a snowflake out my window, I am back in that classroom looking out that exact window feeling the same kind of manic joy I felt then. And it’s sad, because while London is many things, it’s not home anymore. But it’s also fitting, in a way: it’s just. It’s probable I won’t ever live in London again, but it’ll always live in me. I’ll always have the snow.
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Just booked plane tickets for this summer’s adventure: England (mostly London) and Norway (mostly Trondheim, which is apparently where this picture was taken) in June!
I find it incredibly amusing (and also possibly expressive of certain key facts about my life) that the people I’ll be staying with/spending time with in both of these places are people I met through NaNoWriMo: all the London wrimos I befriended while studying abroad, and the two East Bay wrimos I met while one of them was studying abroad in Berkeley.
It feels so good to prepare for another adventure, especially in such good company. And now when this semester starts to get crazy (which, let’s face it, will happen almost as soon as it’s begun), I will have something amazing to look forward to!
(via beadchic)
