Proust on Ruskin

The V.G.H of V.G.H. Thrift Store at 2535 East Hastings may or not stand for Vancouver General Hospital. But that's okay; it seems like a nice place to work, and the staff are welcoming.

Yesterday's visit yielded some finds. A DVD of the pilot (movie) and first two episodes of TV's Ironside (1967-1975), a solo piano CD collection (Mendelssohn, Schubert, Listz, Bach and Busoni) by Murray Perahia and a 1955 Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra CD recording of Weber's Der Freischütz.

Further east, Iron Dog Books, which I like to support, had on display John Sturrock's translation of three Marcel Proust essays bound together and called Days of Reading -- Number 53 in the Penguin "Great Ideas" series. The opening piece, entitled "John Ruskin", is riveting. 

"We would be more keenly alive to the individual charm of a landscape if we did not have at our disposal those seven-league boots which are the great expresses and were obliged, as in the old days, in order to get to some remote spot, to pass through countrysides more and more like that we are making for, like zones of graduated harmony which, by making it less easily penetrable by what is different from itself, and protecting it gently and mysteriously against brotherly remembrances, not only envelope it in nature but also prepare it in our minds." (19)