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To see a world in a grain of sand,
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And a heaven in a wild flower,
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Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
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And eternity in an hour.
The Auguries magazine blog
can be seen here
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I
took this addiction to extremes when my nun ex-policewoman Sister Rose had an
annoying penchant for using quotations (Pain
Wears No Mask, out of print):
I
can’t help it; I find quotations filling my head at the slightest association.
Perhaps my memory is a sin I should renounce. It can be a pain – to me as well
as the listener. So I attempt to keep quotations to a bare minimum, mindful of
what George Eliot wrote: ‘Much quotation of any sort is bad. One couldn’t carry
on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has
been said better than we can put it ourselves.’
Sometimes I wonder if I have any
original thoughts at all, or are they all plucked second-hand, from something
I’ve read. Yet, if I’m honest, books – essentially, the dead walking in the
readers’ heads, speaking to us – are a big part of my world.
[The
Eliot quotation is from Daniel Deronda.
Pain has been rewritten with the new
title Bread of Tears and is seeking a
new publisher.]
And
in my crime series The Avenging Cat, Catherine’s late father had been fond of
Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations:-
She stopped in
front of the two marble headstones:
DEBORAH
VIBRISSAE
(18 October 1958
– 4 June 1992)To bear this worthily is good fortune. Marcus Aurelius.
Father often read Aurelius’ Meditations. The full quotation ran “So here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not, ‘This is a misfortune’, but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune’.” It was hard, but she was thankful she had those years with her father. Many of the ancient Roman’s precepts fell in accord with her heart, but some did not. She could not settle for “Leave another’s wrongdoing where it lies.” No, never that.
***
Marcus
Aurelius, the Stoic, dwelled on time, the soul and the oneness of the universe
a great deal. From Book ten, verse 17:
Let
your mind constantly dwell on all Time and all Being, and thus learn that each
separate thing is but as a grain of sand in comparison with Being, and as a
single screw’s turn in comparison with Time.
Full
circle, sort of, with those grains of sand…
Happy
Easter!
CATALYST
‘Cliffhanging start and scarcely a dull moment from end to
end in this lively caper yarn. Beguiling and credible female protagonist seeks
to bring down the unscrupulous owner of a conglomerate responsible for a
diversity of crimes including the use of animals to test cosmetics, gold mining
in Wales … and experimenting with drugs on illegal immigrants.
The story fairly rattles along … I look forward to the sequel…’ - Review
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