a something of leaves, a something of shadow
So trees produced oxygen in the form of words. ₁
he drew a few lines to indicate the streets and it looked like the branch of a tree with names standing out on the twigs. ₂
a forest of interesting, nitpicking names ₁
when one considers the picture more closely
that a something of incoherent and flimsy obtrudes. The
roads run nowhither ₃
and the words give out their scent, and ripple like leaves, and chequer us with light and shadow ₄
a something of shadow,
Es un algo de sombra ₅
scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They
had something to do with fragrance and colour and sound,
but almost nothing to do with words ₆
the darkest leaf of her whole life-tree,
the senses’ darkest leaf, least understood, least accounted for ₂
tears flow from the uselessness of words ₁
sources
- three leaves, from Murray Bail, Eucalyptus (1998) : pp 198, 206, 199
- Anne Ryan. “The Darkest Leaf.” Botteghe Oscure 22 (1958) : 272-306 / paragraph 34 : link
- William D. McKay on the painter J. C. Wintour, in his The Scottish School of Painting (London, 1906) : 311 / more
The foreground masses of trees on this hand or that, the winding vale or bosky woodland of the middle distance, and the escape into the farther distance, are disposed on the large lines of the masters. It is when one considers the picture more closely that a something of incoherent and flimsy obtrudes itself. The scale of the different parts is badly adjusted. One gets a little confused in attempting to follow the landscape from plane to plane; roads run nowhither; the configuration of the country is ignored; and sometimes the masses of foliage have a clogged and flattened appearance, as in the side scenes at the theatre.
- Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” in The Criterion, vol. 4 (January 1926) : 32-45
hathitrust : link - ex Julia de Burgos, “Es un algo de sombra,” (It is a something of shadow), in Song of the Simple Truth : obra completa poética : the complete poems. Compiled and translated by Jack Agueros (Curbstone Press, 1996) : 172-175
more
evidently first appeared in the author’s posthumous El mar y tú (1954) - Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915) : 299-300
Harvard copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
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