“And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls…falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition.
And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked and a wild bird screams across the glittering land…
And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken plane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy.
The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity.
And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.”
-excerpt from Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
If you haven’t read or watched the BBC miniseries Gormenghast I HIGLY recommend it. To say it’s amazing is an understatement and should be required reading in all schools everywhere.
Kisses & Chaos,
Alli Woods Frederick
image credit: Gormenghast via Graham Todman
