As 2021 draws to a close, we’re looking forward to welcoming Salonistas old and new to studies in 2022, and excited to be beginning our new venture, the LitSalon Challenge. In the meantime, we wish you all a happy and healthy New Year filled with great reading adventures.
See you in the pages . . .
Hello Salonsitas past, current and potential.
This has been such a strange year . . . but, thanks to so many of you, it has been a year of discovery and development for the Salon community. I hope others have found – as I have – the studies to provide some ballast in this unstable time.
There is the frenetic energy of the moments in the Salon when we build upon each other’s ideas, questions, struggles, to come (unexpectedly, with a whoosh of pleasure) to textured reading that resonates with each of us, and with the text. In those moments, the loud world hums around us, briefly, with rhythm instead of dissonance. And, in spite of the divided Zoom frame, I feel connected to a global gathering of hungry minds.
But the Salon has also given me the enduring gift of apt words, deeply witty aphorisms and lyrical phrasings shared between the Salonistas embedded in a particular work. The photo above is an example: all of those cards are Joyce-connected, the postcard from Gibraltar (combining Proust AND Joyce in an involuntary memory connecting fragrance and literary references), a seascape with a vision towards Sandymount, Dylan – grandson of two dedicated Joyceans – preparing for his life-long reading, a Yulysses greeting from a Wakian with this Joyce (Ithaca) quote:
“May this Yuletide bring to thee
Joy and peace and welcome glee”
The winter solstice is a time when I am reminded to stop fighting the dark and hard moments, and instead to make room. To find a space of quiet and reflection, to be mindful of the struggle of others in this hard, hard time, to be present even as the world swirls. And in the gift of poetry, I find words that help me hold the dark:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
And finally, some Joyce trivia: from a 2022 Ulyssian:
Q. What have Sir Richard Rogers (recently departed architect of the Pompidou Centre, Lloyds Building et al) have in common with Mr Joyce?
A. Mr Joyce taught English to Richard Roger’s mother, Dada, when he was in Trieste.
Who knew?
Have a peaceful, happy and healthy time and look forward to catching up in 2022.
P.S. If you haven’t already seen our new LitSalon Challenge it’s free to join and please pass it on to anyone who you think might be interested. You can hear me talking about it on Times Radio here (about 2 hours 25 minutes into the programme, although be warned that it can take quite a long time to load).
Today sees the launch of the LitSalon Challenge. We’ve developed a new online opportunity for anyone who is interested in reading more widely and exploring what the Salon offers but can’t currently join a conventional Salon study. It’s free, open to all and will complement the existing Salon. You can find out more here.
You can hear Toby talking about the Salon and the Challenge on Times Radio’s Hugo Rifkind show today, Saturday 18 December, at around 12.15 GMT (and we’ll make it available later on the website if you can’t listen live).
As someone who wonders about buying green bananas these days (will any of us be here to appreciate them when they ripen?) why take a leap into the dark with Proust, whose reputation inspires trepidation in the heart of the ignorant reader?
I knew Toby’s salon would be a safe space where I could learn from bright, committed, generous friends I had not yet even met. I wanted a fixed appointment in my week when so much of what was once a routine had fallen off a cliff . . .
The Proust Study is way more than a reason to get out of bed every Monday. It is a privilege to share the frustrations and genius of each reading, to get to know the cast of characters, their way of conversing, the class system, the politics, art history, classics, science and human nature, warts and all. I have been horrified by the anti-semitism – as a traditional but not religious Jewish woman I thought, wrongly, I knew all there was to know – and the salon has been sympathetic and equally disgusted by the vile anti-semitism from which Proust doesn’t flinch. I have learned more about furnishings, flowers, clothes, food, fragrances and trees, spires, seascapes, carriages, Paris, army life, snobbery and magic lanterns than I thought possible . . . . and I am only on The Guermantes Way (Volume III).
In a nutshell: ‘Frail, sickly, sensitive, over-imaginative mummy’s boy in middle-class French family reaches adolescence (perhaps, even, becomes an adult, Proust’s narrator changes tense so often I am never entirely certain of anything). Against a backdrop of Dreyfus, crumbling aristocracy, ennui, and the tyranny of servants who make life possible, the volumes are as much about procrastination, memory, the impossibility of love, perception, grief, longing and cake.’
Sue Fox is a journalist and veteran of many Salons
I’ve been thinking a lot about close reading, the kind we do at LitSalon, not the lazy before-bed turning of pages or the rushed speed read of the latest bestseller. The world rushes past us, dips and dodges like a butterfly, but we often fail to notice the markings on its wings. For me, attentive reading can be my moment of watching the butterfly, attending to it.
In Kew Gardens Virginia Woolf is paying attention to moments where the human and natural worlds intermingle. The “zig-zag flights” of butterflies are not unlike the random movements of people through the gardens, all the while a snail slogs linearly toward its goal. We readers are given the opportunity to pause and relish the details — flashes of colour and snatches of conversations — for example, eavesdropping on a married couple contemplating past lovers:
“How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly.”
Woolf’s painterly style invites us to contemplate the words visually, and in these moments at Kew Gardens are distilled a thousand dreams — the human and natural worlds collide in an image where dragonflies contain passions and people are the garden:
“Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue.”
At LitSalon, we practise and celebrate slow reading as a communal act as well as individual activity. Committing to a study is committing to close reading, collaborative meaning-making, and the idea that great thinkers and beautiful words deserve our close attention, our time together. Noticing these fine details is the opposite of scrolling through Twitter, rushing past the rose garden. And great words open up opportunities for conversations we wouldn’t normally have these days.
Yes, it can be hard to make the time for slow reading, but whenever I do, I’m always grateful. And I feel better, ecstatic even. Indeed, it’s not a new idea that reading can increase our well-being and restore our zest for living. In his article The Reading Cure, Blake Morrison writes:
“Plato said that the muses gave us the arts not for “mindless pleasure” but “as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself”. It’s no coincidence that Apollo is the god of both poetry and healing; nor that hospitals or health sanctuaries in ancient Greece were invariably situated next to theatres, most famously at Epidaurus, where dramatic performances were considered part of the cure. When Odysseus is wounded by a boar, his companions use incantations to stop the bleeding.”
Blake Morrison, The Guardian, January 2008
It seems to me that now, more than ever, we can use the kind of healing that comes with careful reading, and that we can benefit from making the time to pay attention. Revisiting the words together expands our understanding, increases empathy, and reduces loneliness — we share assumptions and learn from each other’s reactions. We connect.
Alison Cable is a facilitator at the London Literary Salon, she is currently leading a series of Writing for Wellbeing studies.
© The London Literary Salon 2024