san francisco

[rich]

sorry. DeQuincey added this from Scottish poet James Thomson following the
word without:

And at the doors and windows seem to call,
As heav’n and earth they would together mell;
Yet the least entrance find they none at all;
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall.

*Castle of Indolence*.




On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 10:27 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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