…how oddly this light suffuses the covered arcades which abound in Paris in the vicinity of the main boulevards and which are rather disturbingly named passages, as though no one had the right to linger for more than an instant in those sunless corridors…
…it is only today, when the pickaxe menaces them, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions…
…a strong bond exists in men’s minds between Baths and sensual pleasure: this immemorial notion contributes to the mystery of these public establishments which many people would never venture to visit…
…o philately, philately: you are a most strange goddess, a slightly foolish fairy, and it is you who take by the hand the child emerging from the enchanted forest in which Little Tom Thumb, the Blue Bird, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf have finally gone to sleep side by side…
…we have not directed our critical faculties sufficiently to the problem of the role played by bar and café owners: yet they are people who make a very real contribution to the maintenance of true civilisation…
…everything that is most eccentric in man, the gipsy in him, can surely be summed up in these two syllables: garden…
…recalling the great Suicides’ bridge which, before metal grilles were erected along its sides, claimed victims even from among passers-by who had had no intention whatsoever of killing themselves but found themselves suddenly tempted by the abyss…
Quotes from Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (1926). Pictures taken by V. and I in Paris (2005).
I picked up Joni Tevis’s The Wet Collection at David Mirvish Books in Toronto, “the art book store with the Frank Stella painting,” without knowing anything about it. I was probably drawn in by the Joseph Cornell on the cover and by buzz words such as wunderkammer, nature writing and memory - and it turned out the best book I’ve read for a while. It is a W.G. Sebald-style collection of essays, part memoir part travelogue, centering on themes such as outsider art,
women’s history, geology and religion. See here for two short reviews. And read it, read it soon.
