The Purdzilla Show

Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash I was alone, and I lay on my sofa, drawn across a large open window at the top of the school-house, in a room which was used as a study by the boys who were 'going up for examination'. I gazed down on a labyrinth of garden sloping to the sea, which twinkled faintly beyond the towers of the town. Each of these gardens held a villa in it, but all the near landscape below me was drowned in foliage. A wonderful warm light of approaching sunset modelled the shadows and set the broad summits of the trees in a rich glow. There was an absolute silence below and around me; a magic of suspense seemed to keep every topmost twig from waving. Over my soul there swept an immense wave of emotion. Edmund Gosse (in Father and Son )

 

[My father] missed more than ever the sympathetic ear of my Mother; there was present to support him nothing of that artful, female casuistry which insinuates into the wounded consciousness of a man the conviction that, after all, he is right and all the rest of the world is wrong. Edmund Gosse ( Father and Son )

  Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash Old Laurent Moutier* was gone, at the age of ninety, taking with him like everyone does a lifetime of unknown private hopes and dreams and fears and experiences, and leaving behind him like most people do a thin trace of himself in his living descendants. * Jack Reacher's maternal grandfather Lee Child (in the story Second Son )