Dipping into ‘The Road to Oxiana’ before I lend it to Julian (finding in it a used ticket for the Neue Pinakothek of Munich, 30 June 2010, and some chapters on, a day ticket for the U-bahn bought at Josephplatz.) and lighting on a passage that tells me Robert Byron thinks and writes about colours in exactly the way I do (with mild tendencies of a synaesthete.)‘Suddenly, as a ship leaves an estaury, we came out on to the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. I never saw that colour before. In other greens, of emerald, jade, or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengal jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland, the salad green of Mediterranean vineyards, the heavy full-blown green of English summer beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was the pure essence of green, insoluble, the colour of life itself. The sun was warm, the larks were singing up above. Behind us rose the misty Alpine blue of the wooded Elburze. In front, the glowing verdure stretched out to the rim of the earth.’
Byron made me want ‘Autumn Journal’ (something about her kaleidoscopic authenticity and lies asserting integrity) but I find it not. Later; I have it also as an epub.
Macneice and Byron belong on the same shelf, but not next to each other.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird