From: Stefan Edberg
Category: Amis
Date: 7/7/99
Time: 6:56:57 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.112
[Pöster's nöte: Let me grace your oché. Cause I'm going to Larkinberry Fields. Big fücking deal. And nothing to get hung about. Larkinberry Fields forever.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "On Sunday he had walked with Nicola Six in London fields...Kneeling, the children launched their boats into the cold agitation of the water; the smaller craft wobbled all the more eagerly, as if activity could redress their want of size; among them, a black-sailed unfamiliar." SAMSON YOUNG: "She played for time (taking little rests) by staring in saintly silence at the water: the toy galleon with black sails, in whose wake..." SAMSON YOUNG: "They love to be chased, hilariously aware that the bigger thing cannot but capture them in time. I know how they feel, though of course with me it isn't funny, the bigger thing loping along in my wake, and easily gaining." PHILIP LARKIN: "Only one ship is seeking us, a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence. In her wake no waters breed or break." [From *Next, Please*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "How I wish I could share in her hope---the awakened, lips parted, the new ships." PHILIP LARKIN: "Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear, sparkling armada of promises draw near." [From *Next, Please*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "What we take from animals, what we take from our pets (without trying, and without asking), is a lesson about death: an overview of the shorter span. After two cats and nine hamsters, the adolescent is a bit better equipped for the awful call to his grandmother's bedroom." PHILIP LARKIN: "Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel---Mam, we're playing funerals now." [From *Take One Home for the Kiddies*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "Chapter 7 looms like Keith's tower block. A fortress." SAMSON YOUNG: "Over the gardens and the mansion-block rooftops, over the window boxes and TV aerials, over Nicola's skylight and Keith's dark tower (looming like a calipered leg dropped from heaven), the air gave an exhausted and chastened sigh." PHILIP LARKIN: "Higher than the handsomest hotel the lucent comb shows up for miles". [From *The Building*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "Just smiled and gazed out of the window at the speeding clouds." SAMSON YOUNG: "Above, the clouds were moving with preternatural speed; you felt as if larger units of weather were passing overhead like meteorological discs on a chart---months, entire seasons sweeping by in less than thirty seconds." PHILIP LARKIN: "But if he stood and watched the frigid wind tousling the clouds". [From *Mr. Bleaney*.] PHILIP LARKIN: "And that high-builded cloud moving at summer's pace." [From *Cut Grass*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "It makes me think of Yeats's lines (and here my memory still holds): 'We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, and then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.' " PHILIP LARKIN: "The white steamer is gone. Like breathed-on glass the sunlight has turned milky." [From *To the Sea*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "What impresses and stays with me is the power of the baby's face---*the power*. It is knit tight, like a tautly prominent navel, chockful of possibilities, tumescent with potentiae, as if the million things that could happen to her, the essences of the million Kims there might one day be out there, are concentrated in this powerful face." PHILIP LARKIN: "To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here". [From *The Old Fools*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "Guy's faith, a feebly gleaming heirloom (a locket, perhaps, that once belonged to his dead mother), was much tarnished for a while by the clear impossibility of anything surviving such a thorough subtraction of the human body." PHILIP LARKIN: "Religion used to try, that vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die". [From *Aubade*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "If the intelligent eye could lift off and climb past eaves and skylights, and speed over rooftops, and settle as it liked where people thought they were alone---what on earth would it see?" SAMSON YOUNG: "And how *strange* it is in here, fish-grey, monkey-brown, all the surfaces moist and sticky, and the air no good to breathe." PHILIP LARKIN: "If my darling were once to decide not to stop at my eyes, but to jump, like Alice, with floating skirt into my head...she would find herself looped with the creep of varying light, monkey-brown, fish-grey". [From *If, My Darling*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "You look for the loved one everywhere, of course, in passing cars, in high windows". PHILIP LARKIN: "Rather than words comes the thought of high windows". [From *High Windows*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "What is it that is always pulling us back down?" PHILIP LARKIN: "What loads my hands down?" [From *Going*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "As the darts crowd, the arrowshower, steadily grew in its growling". PHILIP LARKIN: "We slowed again, and as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled a sense of falling, like an arrow-shower sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain." [From *The Whitsun Weddings*.] [Previously mentioned by StephenP.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "Because when we're not there, their worlds begin to fall away. On every side the horizon climbs until it pushes out the sky. The walls come in." PHILIP LARKIN: "In this dream that dogs me I am part of a silent crowd walking under a wall, leaving a football match, perhaps, or a pit, all moving the same way. After a while a second wall closes on our right, pressing us tighter. We are now shut in like pigs down a concrete passage. When I lift my head, I see the walls have killed the sun, and light is cold." [From *Träumerei*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "Hand in hand and arm in arm we totter, through communal fantasy and sorrow, through London fields. We're the dead." PHILIP LARKIN: "Give me your arm, old toad; help me down Cemetery Road." [From *Toads Revisited*.]
SAMSON YOUNG: "On Sunday he had walked with Nicola Six in London fields." PHILIP LARKIN: "There is an evening coming in across the fields, one never seen before, that lights no lamps." [From *Going*.]