1) A day like today, in February, when I can walk down the street without a coat, sit out on the balcony reading, breathing in what feels almost like spring air. So it's like a Spring day, or a promise of that, interpolated into February.
2.) A day which doesn't fit its designated name. So, on or near Christmas for example, people will say 'it feels like a Sunday' or simply 'what day is it?' But in particular, and these are curiously among my favourites, those days that fall between the end of Christmas and the beginning of the New Year - days which seem to have no place, supernumerary days, where time seems to pause, idle days but without guilt, for time itself is stalling not you. These days are, in time, what a railway station is spatially.
5 comments:
You're right, the phrase is from section ten of 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire'. [Trainspotter] YH
Wonderful! Thanks.
“Everyone know that in the run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which – like a sixth smallest toe – grow a thirteenth freak month.
We use the word freak deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot. More tentative than real.
What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days – white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster’s hand, stumps folded into a fist.”
– Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
I love bruno Schulz. KInd of related:
"Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd together and press hard one upon the other without any pause.
[…] Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too early or too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless and errant?"
You might be interested in this slightly wordy 'tribute' I penned a year or so ago:
http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2004/08/tribute-to-bruno-schulz.html
At Christmas 2003, a friend sent me a card with this nice wish for the New Year: "May the extra day that a leap year brings you fall on a weekend!"
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