san francisco

[jochen stremmel]

Thanks, rich, and it's without in the old sense, and there is only missing
a full stop, right?


2013/8/2 rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>

> 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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