It was a way of translating everything that lay outside language: the whisker twitches, the subtle movements of their tails, the invisible but obviously powerful scent networks, and my sense that cats treat time the way they do rooftops, leaping from the present back into ancient clan memories, the way they'd cross from one roof to another.
The novel, with its vast panorama of heady, complex and tragic adult emotions – Anna's aching passion, but also the touching arc of Levin and Kitty's love, and even Dolly's chaotic, overburdened domesticity – seemed to encompass everything that lay ahead of me in life.
By far the best argument against the fetishisation of thin, is to see and enjoy everything that lies beyond it.
Created at different times, in different places, in different styles and mediums, these two images are the roots, here visually interwined, for almost everything that lies beyond.
Now I turn my back on everything that lies behind me: My only companions will be the forest and the shore and the lake.
I want directors and designers to play with space and perspective much more, to try out everything that lies between realism and fantasy.
Peasants are an obstacle to this because they are not great wealth producers, yet they are the owners, collectively, of a resource that is worth a lot to investors – land, and everything that lies below and sits upon it.
After renewing their acquaintance in 1856, Hawthorne wrote: "Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had 'pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated' " -- that is, that there is no afterlife -- but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation...
Perhaps, as one reaches the age of the permanent sabbatical, one becomes more noticeably aware that everything that lies behind us appears to be in motion and unsettled, that memories of separate periods tend to affect one another, that the past, as perceived in time, is subject to mutations.
