“First of all, it seemed to us that you were very handsome.”
beginning sentence = quirky POV. conversational
unidentified vague pronouns (us, you)
obsession with objects being in right position - “And the principal windows of your house were perfectly positioned to display a blazing reflection at sunset.” & “We liked nothing better than to rake the tinkling gravel on your drive, then to climb an impeccable tree along its passage and wait.”
“The other two hung back by the brook with cups on sticks while I made my way over the wall into your ornamental garden, lay down upon the unfeasible grass and fell to sleep wrapped about a lilac seashell, which was of course my most cherished possession.”
— again the possessions
“unfeasible grass” is strictly, perfectly Bennettian
interactions between human & manmade world = sensuous, careful, a dynamic plotless plot all on its own
that’s the end of the first “story.” very brief. important — these vignettes, flashes of oddity.
"Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice.”
a deep pleasure bordering on obsessive, neurotic. certainly offbeat but wavering between the sensual and the manic—
“A splendid deep wide sill with no wooden overlay, just the plastered stone, nice and chilly: the perfect place for a bowl. Even a few actually, a few bowls in fact. The sill’s that big it can accommodate three sizable bowls very well without appearing the least bit encumbered. [ attentive, unusually attentive to the experience of the objects - penetrating beyond their function or appearance but to their near-sentience ] It’s quite pleasant, then, to unpack the pannier bags and arrange everything intently in the bowls upon the sill. Aubergine, squash, asparagus and small vine tomatoes look terribly swish [!!!] together and it’s no surprise at all [again, the objective overtaking the subjective - a whimsy but a touch of the insane] that anyone would experience a sudden urge at any time during the day to sit down at once and attempt with a palette and brush to convey the exotic patina of such an irrepressible gathering [again with the startling, anthropomorphic adjective-noun pairings] of illustrious vegetables, there on the nice cool windowsill.” [that last phrase paraphrases the first of the paragraph, emphatically pleasured]
then about pears - (“Pears don’t mix well.”) and banana + oatcake combo (“a very satisfactory substitute for those mornings when the time for porridge has quite suddenly passed.”)
“If a neighbor has been overheard or the towels folded the day’s too far in and porridge, at this point, will feel vertical and oppressive, like a gloomy repast from the underworld. As such, in all likelihood, a submerged stump of resentment [ah!! not the real story but the other story] will begin to perk up right at the first mouthful and will very likely preside dumbly over the entire day. Until, finally, at around four o’clock, it becomes unfairly but inevitably linked to someone close by, to a particular facet of their behaviour in fact, a perpetually irksome facet that can be readily isolated and enlarged [the delight in things being rightly placed or timed; the hostility at things/people being out of alignment — a delightful madness, a particularity] and thereupon pinpointed as the prime cause of this most foreboding sense of resentment, which has been on the rise, inexplicably, all day, since that fist mouthful of porridge.”
this flight from the main thought [what is the main thought?] to something that is neither fully anecdotal nor fully/clearly projected in imagination is common. indeed, the prime movement of the psyche being portrayed in this book.
but is this intensive digressive tendency an oddity? does it set her apart and thus delight us with its oddity? or does it delight via recognition of a fixative tendency in us all in the “mundane”? this is the question of the book - the unanswerable and wonderful question