Keeping a Book of Centuries
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In My Notebook...

In my Commonplace...

11/17/2014

3 Comments

 

"The glorious transmutation of autumn had come on: all the vast Canadian shores were clothed with a splendour never seen in France; to which all the pageants of all the kings were as a taper to the sun. Even the ragged cliff-side behind her kitchen door was beautiful; the wild cherry and sumach and the blackberry vines had turned crimson, and the birch and poplar saplings were yellow. Up by Blinker's cave there was a mountain ash, loaded with orange berries.

In the Upper Town the grey slate roofs and steeples were framed and encrusted with gold. A slope of roof or a dormer window looked out from the twisted russet branches of an elm, just as old mirrors were framed in gilt garlands. A sharp gable rose out of a soft drift of tarnished foliage like a piece of agate set in fine goldsmith's work. So many kinds of gold, all gleaming in the soft, hyacinth-colored haze of autumn: wan, sickly gold of the willows, already dropping; bright gold of the birches, copper gold of the beeches. Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even--a blue like amethysts, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content."  
Willa Cather

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3 Comments
BONNIE link
11/24/2014 11:41:59 am

This is so beautiful that it makes me want to read the book.
Are you snowed under?

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Laurie
11/24/2014 09:58:07 pm

Oh, read Shadows on the Rock. It is beautifully written. Maybe I'm biased. Have you ever visited Quebec? No snow here, (she said gleefully!)

Reply
BONNIE B Buckingham
11/25/2014 12:54:56 pm

I have not been to Quebec but have been to St. John's and PEI.
It looks like snow may be coming your way?! I love Willa Cather's writing . Have to see if I have this book. Thanks for the beautiful quote!




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    "Ideas 
    ​won't keep; something must be done about them."

     - Alfred Whitehead

     

    A Charlotte Mason education leads to all kinds of ideas! Join me in keeping one or several of the notebooks she prescribed and discover the Science of Relations and the Art of Mindfulness.

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    "Perhaps this is one of the secrets of life--to know 'glory' when we see it." 
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    A wee explanation: this website was created as a way to amplify the daily surprise of seeing glory in one small life.  The notebook entries represented here are all selected from things actually lived and noted on paper in an effort to live the full life British educator Charlotte Mason so ably championed.  ​ 

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  • welcome
    • About the Book of Centuries
  • in my notebook...
  • shop
  • conversation
    • presentations
  • One Hundred Days
    • Original Invitation