san francisco

[rich]

just happened to be reading DeQuincey and yr post reminded of this:

Let there be a cottage standing in a valley, eighteen miles from any
town—no spacious valley, but about two miles long by three-quarters of a
mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is that all the
family resident within its circuit will compose, as it were, one larger
household, personally familiar to your eye, and more or less interesting to
your affections.  Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3,000 and
4,000 feet high, and the cottage a real cottage, not (as a witty author has
it) “a cottage with a double coach-house;” let it be, in fact (for I must
abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with flowering
shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls and
clustering round the windows through all the months of spring, summer, and
autumn—beginning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with jasmine.  *Let
it, however, not be spring, nor summer, nor autumn, but winter in his
sternest shape.  This is a most important point in the science of
happiness.  And I am surprised to see people overlook it, and think it
matter of congratulation that winter is going, or, if coming, is not likely
to be a severe one.  On the contrary, I put up a petition annually for as
much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or other, as the skies can
possibly afford us.  Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures
which attend a winter fireside, candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs,
tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies
on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without*


On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 9:10 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> For those of you who are still listening, three more paragraphs:
>
>
> ......
> Gloomy persons like gloomy weather. They like foggy days and rain and
> sleet. They can understand those and cope with them. But it's on those
> shiny, bird-singing days that they order up the two-fifths of vodka and
> take the sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet, or crawl out on the
> ledge of the building, or go out to the garage with a length of hose and
> tape it to the exhaust. I went over to the window and stared down at the
> girls in their sunglasses and short summer dresses and wished it would
> rain.
>
> Enjoy!
>
>
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