Lathom·House, Middleton Manor, New Hall, Silverton, Brickling with its crinkled windows and rose-pink gables are converted to surgeries, polytechnics, cells ot the understatted asylum crumbling on the heads ot the mad. The country houses that rolled like railways are now more stationary than anthills - their service gone. Will they tali under the ax ot penai taxes they tirsi existed to enact... too grand tor any gallery? Will the house tor pleasure predecease its predecessor, the cathedral, once outshone in art and cost? Cold chimneystacks and greening statuary outlive the living garden parceled to irreversible wilderness WeTook Our Paradise We took our paradise here - how else love? Thesethree weeks the weather has accreted reek hke a bathroom mirror: h1lls,cows, molehills, the oceanless mland ... the harvest we whistle from grass. Thestruck oak that lost a hmb thai weighed a ton stili shakes green leaves and takes the daylight, Ulyssesand Circe Tenyears betore Troy, ten years before Circe - things changed to the names he gave them, then lost their names: Myrmidons, Spartans, soldier of dire Ulysses ... Why should I renew his intamous sorrow? He had his part, he thought of building the wooden horse as big as a house and ended the ten years' war. "By force of fraud", he says, "I did what neither Diomedes, nor Achilles son of Thetis, nor the Greeks w1th their thousand ships ... I destroyed Troy." Il What is more uxonous than waking at five with the sun and three hours free? He sees the familiar bluish-brown river dangle down her flat young torearm, then crisscross. The sun rises, a red bonfire, by one untended year - from something to nothing ... like King Charles who lost his head and shared the luck and strange fibered Puritan violence ot his antagonist, che Protector, whose carcass they drew on a hurdle to Tyburn, hanged and buried under the gallows. lt they have you by the neck, a rope will be found. Nulle terre sans seigneur. The old follies, as usual, never return - the houses stili burn in the golden lowtide steam of Turner. Only when we start to go, do we notice the outrageous phallic tiare of the splash flowers that fascinated children. The reign of the kingfisher was short. as il alive. Can one bear it; in nature from seed to chaft no tragedy? Folly comes from something - the present, yes, we are in it; it's the intection of thmgs gone ... the Atlantic rattling paper I haven ·1 heard three years. Why does a man love a woman more than women? weakly rattling in the lower branches - thai eats like a locust and leaves the tree entire. In ten minutes perhaps, or whenever he next wakes up, the sun 1swhite as it mostly is, dull changer of night to day, itself unchanged, in war or peace. The blinds give bars of sunlight, bars of shade, but the latter predominate over the sincerity ot her sybaritic bed. She lies beside him, a delicious, somnolent log. She says, "Such wonderful things are being said to me - l'm such an old sleeper, I can't respond." 111 O that morning might come without the day - he lies awake and fears the servants, the civilities ot their savage, assiduous voices. lt's out of hand ... her exotic palace Robert Lowe/1 - 37
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