The Wrong Empire

May 26

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Tom Hiddleston reading Shakespeare Sonnet 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

(via kamero-gomez)

May 25

It turned out to be a lovely day despite how it started (Taken with Instagram at Mcgraw Hill Building)

“Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.” Rosemary Urquico (via blitzkreigkate

(via thebooksmugglers)

May 24

Towers in the rain (Taken with Instagram at 1 World Trade Center)

“I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labor at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as particular as a nose, and lay you in the grass amongst the bluebells.”

From Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears.

May 23

Waiting for water lilies to bloom in the Hardy Pool #monetsgarden (Taken with Instagram at New York Botanical Garden)

May 22

Replica of Monet’s iconic Japanese Bridge crossing a small pond (Taken with Instagram at New York Botanical Garden)

Recreation of the Grande Allee in Monet’s Garden (Taken with Instagramat New York Botanical Garden)

“It is here, in this perpetual feast for the eyes, that Claude Monet lives. And it is surely the environment that one imagines for this prodigious painter of the splendid life of colour, for this prodigious poet of tender lights and veiled forms, for he who would make exhilarating and perfumed paintings that breathe, who knew how to grasp the intangible, express the inexpressible, and who imbued our dream with the entire mysterious dream enclosed in nature, of the entire dream mysteriously scattered in divine light.”

From a first hand account written in1891 by French art critic Octave Mirbeau and translated by Benedict Loca in the book Monet in Giverny: Landscapes of Reflection

Entrance to the stunning Monet’s Garden exhibition (Taken with Instagram at New York Botanical Garden)

“These landscapes of water and reflections have become my obsession. They are quite beyond the powers of an old man, and despite everything I want to succeed on conveying what I feel.”

Claude Monet to Gustave Geffroy,1883

“Give, give, give — what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don’t give it away? Of having stories if I don’t tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don’t share it? I don’t intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine.”

Novelist Isabel Allende finds inspiration in the life of service her daughter led, and comfort in the love Allende was able to give her in death.

The Wrong Empire

An Englishwoman in New York