I can never read in summer out-of-doors. Though in shadow the bright light fills it, summer shadows are broadest daylight. The page is so white and hard, the letters so very black, the meaning and drift not quite intelligible, because neither eye nor mind will dwell upon it. Human thoughts and imaginings written down are pale and feeble in bright summer light. The eye wanders away, and rests more lovingly on greensward and green lime leaves. The mind wanders yet deeper and farther into the dreamy mystery of the azure sky. Once now and then, determined to write down that mystery and delicious sense while actually in it, I have brought out table and ink and paper, and sat there in the midst of the summer day. Three words, and where is the thought? Gone. The paper is so obviously paper, the ink so evidently ink, the pen so stiff; all so inadequate. You want colour, flexibility, light, sweet low sound - all these to paint it and play it in music, at the same time you want something that will answer to and record in one touch the strong throb of life and the thought, or feeling, or whatever it is that goes out into the earth and sky and space, endless as a beam of light. The very shade of the pen on the paper tells you how utterly hopeless it is to express these things. There is the shade and the brilliant gleaming whiteness; now tell me in plain written words the simple contrast of the two. Not in twenty pages, for the bright light shows the paper in its common fibre-ground, coarse aspect, in its reality, not as a mind-tablet....but i usually write out doors, often in sunshine, while keeping the touch-screen in shadow... perhaps with a hand-held-touch-screen instead of pen-and-ink-and-paper Richard Jefferies would also have been able to read and write outside on sunny days?
the film has "no plot, no characters, nothing", hoping it would "give pleasure without having any meaning whatsoever" it is to be "free of politics, economics and even of oneself"....the film was sent me as a gift by Christian Glahn in Denmark who asked me out of the blue if i knew of some audio tales that are difficult to obtain... it happened that i have some which i was able to send to him... how wonderful it is that he should find (via the internet) that i had the tapes and i should receive the film, though until this week we were unaware of the existence of the tapes, the film, or each other... and also that Tim Jones was able to introduce me (so easily and quickly via the web) to the writings of Richard Jefferies... thank you to both!...
"Of course the film will be about the effect of light in an empty space. But no space is actually empty and the light will show what is in it. And all this space and all this light will be controlled by random operations."
for comfortable line length set the window to about two-thirds of the screen width
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