The Blind Man

He went away upstairs. She saw him mount into the darkness, unseeing and unchanging. He did not know that the lamps on the upper corridor were unlighted.He went on into the darkness with unchanging step. She heard him in the bath-room.

Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings, dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience. He did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he wanted no intervention of visual consciousness.

In this state there was a certain rich positivity, bordering sometimes on rapture. Life seemed to move in him like a tide lapping, lapping, and advancing, enveloping all things darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try to remember, to visualise. He did not want to. The new way of consciousness substituted itself in him.

Quotation: The Blind Man by D.H. Lawrence. Penguin, 2011.

Stress of a Hunger Migration

It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures living in the sea, must, to a large extent, forever remain unknown to us, since under water they are too nimble for nets, and it is only by such rare unlooked-for accidents that specimens can be obtained. In the case of Haploteuthis ferox, for instance, we are still altogether ignorant of its habitat, as ignorant as we are of the breeding-ground of the herring or the sea-ways of the salmon. And zoologists are altogether at a loss to account for its sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it was the stress of a hunger migration that drove it hither out of the deep. But it will be, perhaps, better to avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion and to proceed at once with our narrative.

Mr Fison, torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the wave-worn rocks, and, finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly rendered them extremely slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and socks, and coiled his trousers above his knees. His object was, of course, merely to avoid stumbling into the rocky pools about him, and perhaps he was rather glad, as all men are, of an excuse to resume, even for a moment, the sensations of his boyhood.

Quotation from: The Sea Raiders by H.G. Wells. Penguin 2010

Volcanic Moon

A normal moon-rise over part of the University campus, before the ash plume from the eruption of the Chilean volcano reached New Zealand.

This hand-held shot of the moon taken the following evening, at about the same time, shows a distinctly red moon. Seen through some trees and through layers of atmosphere filled with ash and volcanic dust, it appeared red.

As the moon rose higher in the sky it lost its red colour.

Gulls and Chips

One calm sunny day at the beach, the gulls bothered some people for food. They sniff out free grub easily, even if the grub is safe inside a car with the windows up. Visual cues are important too, as it seems like you only have to pretend to eat and the action of hand to mouth will be enough to elicit gull curiosity.

However, in they are not usually fooled for long, and in this case have decided to settle on the railings.

Or on the beach.

There again there's always one or two who get overexcited and won't settle down for love or money.

Arguing

Pietro and Tommaso were always arguing.

At dawn the squeaking of their old bicycles and the sound of their voices – Pietro’s hollow and nasal, Tommaso’s husky and sometimes hoarse - were the only noises to be heard in the empty streets. They used to cycle to work together to the factory where they worked. From the other side of the shutter slats you could still feel the sleep and darkness weighing on the rooms. The muffled ringing of alarm clocks began a sporadic dialogue from one house to the next, becoming denser in the suburbs, until finally it merged, as town merged into country, into a back and forth of cock-a-doodle-doos.

Quotation: The Queen’s Necklace. Italo Calvino. Penguin. 2011