Orwell and the toads
As part of what is becoming a continuing series on authors and toads (see Camus and the toads and Thoreau and the toads), today I bring you a selection from Orwell’s essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” as featured in the recent collection Facing Unpleasant Facts.
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something—some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature—has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time—at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.
I was pleased to be reminded not only that Orwell (like Thoreau) saw the toad as an important sign of spring, but that he noticed (as I did as a child) the beauty of its gold-flecked eye. Long ago it occurred to me that when Shakespeare wrote that the toad, “ugly and venomous / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head,” he might not have been speaking literally.
Buy Indie Day
As noted by GalleyCat, today is Buy Indie Day, on which you are encouraged to go to your local independent bookstore and buy a book.
Need help finding one? IndieBound provides this store finder. And if you’re in New York, it’s even easier. The Independent Booksellers of New York City have put together this handy list, including personal favorites like 192, Alabaster, Community, East West, Forbidden Planet, Housing Works, Idlewild, McNally Jackson, Melville House (all independent presses, all the time), St. Mark’s, Strand, Unoppressive Non-Imperialist, and one that took me a shamefully long time to discover: Book Court.
Margaret Drabble quits fiction
I was troubled to find out recently that Margaret Drabble has decided to stop writing novels, claiming that she is afraid of repeating herself as she grows older. The story was reported in the Guardian and in somewhat snarkier form in the Telegraph.
Margaret Drabble has been one of my favorite writers for many years, and I borrowed the title of one of her novels for this blog. Though I haven’t enjoyed her later novels as much as I did The Ice Age, The Realms of Gold, and the Radiant Way trilogy, it still bothers me to think that there won’t be any more. Maybe because all good things come to an end, and I don’t like to be reminded of it. Or maybe because it seems an illustration of how life—advancing age, her husband’s illness, the long unpleasantness between Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt—triumphs over art. The undercurrent of melancholy has always been pretty strong in Drabble’s work, but she created some beautiful art from it.
At least there’s still her memoir The Pattern in the Carpet to read, as soon as it’s available in the States.
Interviewed by Laura
A few days ago I was pleased to hear from Laura Cococcia, who blogs at Laura Reviews, that she had enjoyed my book A Basket of Leaves. She is using it to help prepare for a trip to Ghana—one of the purposes I had hoped it would be used for. (I’d rather have bookstores shelve it in Travel than in Literary Criticism, which I think better suits the spirit if not the letter of the project.)
I was even more pleased to be asked for an online interview in Laura’s Awesome Authors series, which appeared today. Many thanks! (And have a great time in Ghana.)
