I spent this morning cleaning my desk, changing some of my posters and straightening a bookcase. My work room is still a mess, but as I constantly tell myself, ‘to start is to finish’. Straightening the bookcase I pulled out this one book called A Book of Beauty an anthology of words and pictures. It isn’t very big, but it has poems and words from various eras and authors. There’s one I have to share. It’s part of a letter from Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth written 30th January 1801. This gives a fantastic peek through time at Regency London. It makes me wish I could time travel, if only to follow this man in his adventures.
I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street. the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles-life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, and sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheap’ning books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomines, London itself a pantomime and masquerade, – all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into the night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the Motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life.
I know how he feels. I call these moments of joy, Magical Moments. They happen without warning; you can only be aware of your surroundings and be prepared to pause. When my senses catch hold of something that tantalises; a smell, a sight, a sound…I sometimes feel a strange subtle sensation of time having disolved and my eyes fill with tears. Too soon the moment passes, but for a brief moment I was in a story. If You’ve ever read Andre Norton’s Octagon Magic you’ll know what I mean. The moments are haunting. It makes me wonder…