I’m making slow progress, intentionally, through Gabriel Josipovoci’s Whatever Happened to Modernism?. It is so thrilling to read a book packed chock full of so much insight. Between scribbling notes and pausing to reread passages, it will be an enjoyable week’s reading.

In parallel I am reading Heinrich Von Kleist’s The Marquise of O- and Other Stories. In the Penguin Classics edition the first story, which I read in the garden drinking breakfast tea, is The Earthquake in Chile: the denouement is inevitable and yet so chilling. I’ve wanted to read The Marquise of O- for a long time. This edition includes Michael Kohlhaas, which Josipovici names, with Madame Bovary and The Devils as the greatest nineteenth century novels.

Back to Josipovici’s latest: in the current chapter he is juxtaposing one of my favourite poets with a similarly favoured painter Caspar David Friedrich. In doing so he cites one of my most cherished of Wordsworth’s shorter poems, A Night Piece:

The sky is overcast
With a continuous cloud of texture close,
Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon,
Which through that veil is indistinctly seen,
A dull, contracted circle, yielding light
So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls,
Chequering the ground – from rock, plant, tree, or tower.
At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam
Startles the pensive traveller while he treads
His lonesome path, with unobserving eye
Bent earthwards; he looks up – the clouds are split
Asunder, – and above his head he sees
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black-blue vault she sails along,
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small
And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss
Drive as she drives: how fast they wheel away,
Yet vanish not! – the wind is in the tree,
But they are silent; – still they roll along
Immeasurably distant; and the vault,
Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds,
Still deepens its unfathomable depth.
At length the Vision closes; and the mind,
Not undisturbed by the delight it feels,
Which slowly settles into peaceful calm,
Is left to muse upon the solemn scene.