‘With the first lighting of a cottage candle a man becomes an entirely new being, and moves in a totally different world to that of daytime. He is now born into a world whose god is a rushlight, and a man’s last moments in this world generally come when the light is extinguished and he creeps into bed.
Every common appearance that during the day the vulgar sun has shown, becomes changed by candlelight. For now a thousand whimsical shapes, dim shades and shadows, come, that no daytime has ever seen or known. The bright sun of heaven that has made all things upon earth only too real is not now to be feared by the housewife as a telltale, for all is become magic and a pretty cheat. Dust upon a book or in a corner, a straw upon the floor-cloth, show now only as objects of interest. The black stain that the smoke from the lamp has made upon the ceiling becomes colour and is not unlovely. The cheap wallpaper, though wrinkled and torn, has now a right to be so, and is not regarded with displeasure. Nothing after sunset need be looked at too closely, and everything pleases if regarded in a proper evening manner.
Man is drugged and charmed by this benificent master whose name is darkness; he becomes more joyful, and thank goodness, less like himself. With the first lighting of the lamp, love and hatred, the sole rulers of human life, take a new form and colour. Love becomes more fantastical in the darkness and malice less logical, and both the one and the other are more full of the strange matters that dreams are made of.
Duration itself has a mind to dance or stand on one leg, for a winter’s evening here is often felt to be a period of time as long as a lifetime, and is filled more fully than ever a lifetime can be with unlikely happenings. Even the soft mud of a road in late November, and the little clinging drops of misty rain that may be falling, change their aspect in the darkness and become different in character from what they were known to be in the daytime…’
Michael would have said more, only Mr Weston interrupted him.
- T. F. Powys, Mr Weston’s Good Wine
Discuss.
Brilliant quote with much truth in it, Kim, from one of my favourite books.
The title is from Byron?
From another timeless novel:
But I think Powys has poetically and aptly summed up the atmosphere of night. Alcohol, as in Mr Weston’s Good Wine, no doubt, is the missing ingredient that helps the ease into a less sharp and perhaps more insightful perception when the sun goes down early on cold Winter eves.
Thank you, Kim, I will have to reread Mr Weston. Powys is a writer who deserves a much bigger readership. It’s such a lovely winter book.
Lovely stuff.
But does malice really become less logical in the dark? What about the psychological aspects of fear and how it plays on the human psyche?
Guy, I think the passage probably needs to be seen in the context of what happens next in the book. But on the other hand, sleepless nights and thinking about enmity might say something about malice.
T. F. Powys was a very odd bod - from a literary family (both his brothers were novelists too) - and a kind of pagan Anglican hermit.
I also am sometimes of a mind to dance or stand on one leg at night after a few drinks!
Kim, I think the test of great writing is its ability to be removed from context and still stand up. Which this piece, and the title line from Byron, both do. Hadn’t read that since I was an angst-ridden teen - but it’s still bloody marvellous, isn’t it.
But let’s discuss the motives behind the post? Come on, Kim - what’s it all about?
Voluntary lamp and/or candlelight: oh, so very romantic.
Neglected To Pay The Hydro Bill Even After Six Weeks Of Threatening Notices: kinda ‘meh.’
…ok.
Seriously, that’s gorgeous, and I can’t imagine why I haven’t read anything of his before.
“She walks in beauty, like the night.”
Yep that’s my Bosphorus dog-paddling homie Byron alright. One of the best things he ever wrote.
That same quote was put to excellent work as a totemic incantation in another great book about the transcendental mysteries of the night - “Declare” by Tim Powers. Think Alan Furst meets Lord Dunsany. Or LeCarre meets Lovecraft.
Tony, no particular point was just re-reading the book the other night!
Miss P., the novel is brilliant - you should read!
If you’re talking Byron & Powers, m’lud Nabsy, The Stress of Her Regard is the appropriate tome. Think back to that night in 1816, the Year Without Summer, on Lake Geneva that produced both Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the wellspring of romantic vampire fiction.
Oh what a night! I am so the reincarnation of Mary Shelley (nee Wollstonecraft)!
Nee Godwin, Kimberella. Wollstonecraft was her mother.
Mustn’t comment when pissed!
Oh yeah, M. Fyodor, I’m hip to Power’s oeuvre. Shame Russell wasn’t when he made “Gothic”. And when is someone gonna turn “The Anubis Gates” into a movie? I can imagine Terry Guilliam going to town on the final sequence where a drugfucked Coleridge travels through the mutated deep underworld of London’s underworld towards the Anubis Gates themselves.
Another book worth checking out is Mario Praz’s “The Romantic Agony” which sets out to explore to the strange and emotionally-seething night-framed giddiness of the English gothic revival and its visionaries, poets and writers, all erupting in parallel with the Industrial Revolution and peaking with Blake.
Anyhoo, now popped “Mr Weston’s Good Wine” onto my books to buy list.
Feckin’ “A”, Volya. “The Anubis Gates” would make a fantastic movie, in all the senses of the word.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before M. Fyodor, but Powers was one of a group of proteges/acolytes/mentorees of a certain Philip K. Dick - along with James Blaylock and K. W. Jeter.
I hope this info nugget should also encourage others here to check out Tim Powers.
Yes, and he knew Dick at a very sad time in his life: marriage breakup, drug rehab and homelessness - the whole tortured & unappreciated genius shebang.
Tim Powers is the best fantasy novelist you’ve never heard of, and every feckin’ clown has read Dan Brown. TANJ.
“She walks in beauty, like the night.”
More shades of Nastassja…..?
I first read T.F.’s Mr Weston’s Good Wine as an antidote to J.C.’s Glastonbury Romance, and it certainly did the trick.
Nasty K. hasn’t walked in beauty like the night since Tess. Whassup girl? You still have many gentleman (and lady) admirers who’d rilly appreciate your return to a stylish silver screen instead of a cacky V-movie.
She irradiated the warm Louisiana night with her deathless beauty in Cat People the remake, though.
(Apologies for the sideways de-railing rhetorical tricksy thing, Kim.)
Yeah I thought Schrader’s “Cat People” was a pretty underrated film too. It had some ludicrous moments like the mythic bloodstory flashbacks, that dopey Bowie song and McDowell eating the scenery from time to time. But Nasty and N’awlins itself were perfectly cast for the way that particular tale was retold.
If you ever feel like tying someone up after dark for a little heuristic, hermetic and holistic fooling around, that flick’s always a good scene-setting accessory (…so I’ve been told).
This comment would be much funnier if we had the gravatars back.
Kim - do you really feel you are the reincarnation of Mary Shelley or do you say that in jest?
- Anai
In jest, Anai.
The reason I ask is that over the last 10 years - I have become aware of at least one set of specific past life memories - memories which my mom tells me I had as a child but forgot about the age of 7 and they didn’t resurface (with remarkable clarity) until I was about 25 or so. Your post that you were the reincarnation of Mary Shelley sort of freaked me out as I am someone who knew and loved her dearly once. - Anai
I am absolutely convinced I was N.V. Gogol in a previous life. Has anyone out there seen my coat?
Given that something like 99.9% of humans who have ever lived have been peasants scraping a living from the ground, the probability that any of us are the reincarnations of interesting people like Gogol, Shelley or Cleopatra is very low indeed.
Or could this be the new way of flirting with Kimberella?
Has anyone else read that sci-fi story about how lots of people can be incarnations of previous dead people? So we could all be incarnations of famous dead people. In the story, people have ‘degrees’ of incarnation — some have very strong memories, some very weak.
Anyway, in the story a group of people are putting on a play about Joan of Arc and they get one of her “strongest” incarnations to play her… and she utterly sucks playing herself.
Which reminds me about another story, in which Jesus comes back as a 12 year old black girl living in the Bronx.
Moving right along…
“Anyway, in the story a group of people are putting on a play about Joan of Arc and they get one of her “strongest” incarnations to play her… and she utterly sucks playing herself.”
Err, rings a bell, but I was being told about it rather than reading it myself. (Possibly it is a neat literary extension of the idea that on average we have one water molecule in our bodies that was a water molecule in [insert famous person here. i heard it as Henry the Eighth]’s body. The idea being that you could, by chance, have (say) twenty water molecules that were joan of arc and thus you would be the person on earth who is the most Joan of Arc.)
Double errr, haven’t I read this comment before??
Well, I thought that, too, Mark, but Fyodor/Gogol has me wonderin’…
I met an old bloke who had worked as a very junior member of MacArthur’s staff in Brisbane, and he thought Greg Peck was a far better MacArthur than Doug himself. And that was a crap movie - I mean, imagine if you’d been played in a movie by Ingrid Bergman or Robert De Niro or someone - how intimidating would that be when someone asked you to play yourself?
Tony, it might be a clue that in Gogol’s most famous novel, the protagonist tries to buy up as many lost souls as he can…
Glad to see T. F. Powys has some appreciative readers–even fans. I like that felicitous description of Kim’s –”a pagan Anglican hermit.” Perhaps some of your readers would be interested in my recent “T. F. Powys: Aspects of a Life” (Brynmill Press, 2005)?