This piece brought to my mind the song 'Perhaps love': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toYfeN0ACDw. 'Some say love is holding on, and some say letting go. Some say love is everything, and some say they don't know.' I say I don't know. ('Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny...')
I've never read Durrell, but do know a nice sentence from his Alexandria quartet that has become moderately widely quoted in books on the Mediterranean: 'The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is.' I associate Durrell with other mid-century British writers of the Mediterranean and the Greek/Byzantine world – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rose Macaulay, Steven Runciman (whose history of the Crusades is the only work from this cluster I've read), and, on the Turkish side, Lord Kinross. One day I'll read them.
After having read a good deal about this or that bit of the Mediterranean, I finally saw it for the first time two years ago, in Marseilles. Last year I went to Istanbul – very worthwhile, but for me oddly 'nostalgic', in that it was in my school years that I was really interested in Byzantine history and would have been thrilled in a more immediate/less second-order way.
Where books go with places, there is a general question of whether one should first read the book first or visit the place. At present I tend to think, read the book first, if possible. Visiting after reading is like meeting for the first time a friend whom one came to know, perhaps really quite well, through correspondence. (For me, it was in moving to England that something like this happened on the largest scale.) Reading after visiting is like reading letters of a friend from whom one has moved far away. Surely the former is usually preferable, though the latter too is valuable.
Are attachments to or interests in places or periods of history – or books or songs or paintings – somewhat like relationships to people – love or friendship? I'd guess so. They too can be held on to or let go, can mark stages of life (as Byzantine history in my case); one can learn more about a work of art or a person in revisiting them on different occasions. Are there books that you once cared greatly about, but eventually faded away to become parts of your reading history rather than present life?
Cavafy (to return to Alexandria) wrote, bleakly, about someone who wanted to let go but couldn't in his poem 'The City': https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51295/the-city-56d22eef2f768. (I came across it in another translation, one by the incumbent Professor of Poetry.) Sometimes I feel, mostly not too seriously, it could be about Oxford – I hope not!
This piece brought to my mind the song 'Perhaps love': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toYfeN0ACDw. 'Some say love is holding on, and some say letting go. Some say love is everything, and some say they don't know.' I say I don't know. ('Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny...')
I've never read Durrell, but do know a nice sentence from his Alexandria quartet that has become moderately widely quoted in books on the Mediterranean: 'The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is.' I associate Durrell with other mid-century British writers of the Mediterranean and the Greek/Byzantine world – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rose Macaulay, Steven Runciman (whose history of the Crusades is the only work from this cluster I've read), and, on the Turkish side, Lord Kinross. One day I'll read them.
After having read a good deal about this or that bit of the Mediterranean, I finally saw it for the first time two years ago, in Marseilles. Last year I went to Istanbul – very worthwhile, but for me oddly 'nostalgic', in that it was in my school years that I was really interested in Byzantine history and would have been thrilled in a more immediate/less second-order way.
Where books go with places, there is a general question of whether one should first read the book first or visit the place. At present I tend to think, read the book first, if possible. Visiting after reading is like meeting for the first time a friend whom one came to know, perhaps really quite well, through correspondence. (For me, it was in moving to England that something like this happened on the largest scale.) Reading after visiting is like reading letters of a friend from whom one has moved far away. Surely the former is usually preferable, though the latter too is valuable.
Are attachments to or interests in places or periods of history – or books or songs or paintings – somewhat like relationships to people – love or friendship? I'd guess so. They too can be held on to or let go, can mark stages of life (as Byzantine history in my case); one can learn more about a work of art or a person in revisiting them on different occasions. Are there books that you once cared greatly about, but eventually faded away to become parts of your reading history rather than present life?
Cavafy (to return to Alexandria) wrote, bleakly, about someone who wanted to let go but couldn't in his poem 'The City': https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51295/the-city-56d22eef2f768. (I came across it in another translation, one by the incumbent Professor of Poetry.) Sometimes I feel, mostly not too seriously, it could be about Oxford – I hope not!