"....you must not so much regard the important monuments and famous public buildings, as wind yourself into the byeways, the hidden and devious maze of unregarded streets," to come at the true notion of London.

[darklybrightpress.com]

"Let me not be misunderstood: Camden Town is not in all its parts a synonym for the earthly paradise. I crossed Great College-street; as ugly and dismal and noisy a thoroughfare as I know. And then there is a horrid little street beyond; it starts from a gloomy factory and seems to end in a railway bridge; its houses are mean and melancholy. And yet even this sad, grimy place is lit up by one tree, a cloud of brilliant green, planted before one of the little grey houses: the eye is refreshed and the soul is refreshed, as it were, by the sight of an oasis in a barren wilderness."

If you like and own Machen's book The London Adventure, here's something to print out and fold in with your copy.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> "....you must not so much regard the important monuments and famous public buildings, as wind yourself into the byeways" (Arthur Machen)
> [darklybrightpress.com]
> Dale, have you read Walter De La Mare's "The Vats"? It's a 10 page

Dale Nelson wrote, and quoted in part:

"....you must not so much regard the important monuments and famous public buildings, as wind yourself into the byeways" (Arthur Machen)
> [darklybrightpress.com]
> Speaking of wanderings, Dale, have you read Walter De La Mare's "The Vats"? It concludes his first collection, THE RIDDLE & other Stories, following the title story. First published May 1923. Autobiographical and very prose-poetic, it describes a remote site of about nine abandoned reservoirs chanced upon during a long hike by two friends who had been commiserating on the passage of Time. I would like to hear anyone's opinion of this story, and of De La Mare's concept of sublimity: "It is indeed the unseen, the imagined, the untold-of, the fabulous, the forgotten that alone lies safe from mortal moth and rust; and these Vats-- their very silence held us spellbound, as were the Isles before the Sirens sang" (302). The effect is enhanced by the shared nature of the experience, as De La Mare's concrete imagery conveys their sense of terror and dwarfed disorientation, faced with the "antediluvian monstrosity" of the overgrown structures. This leads to more allusive imagery, idealizing the serendipitous nature of the experience:
"Yet within the lightless bellies of these sarcophagi were heaped up, we were utterly assured, (though how, I know not) floods, beyond measure, of the waters for which our souls had pined. Waters, imaginably so clear as to be dense, as if of melted metal more translucent even than crystal; of such a tenuous purity that not even the moonlit branches of a dream would spell their reflex in them; so costly, so far beyond price, that this whole stony world's rubies and sapphires and amethysts of Mandalay and Guadalajara and Solikamst, all the treasure-houses of Cambalech and the booty of King Tamburlane would suffice to purchase not one drop" (301-2). I'm sure Clark Ashton Smith, and Machen of course, appreciated the prose poem-like discursiveness of De La Mare's writing. Rereading "The Vats" reminded me of a news article I saw the same day, claiming that the extraction of so much water from the earth has possibly tilted the Earth's axis!

jkh

I might have read "The Vats" a long time ago, but in any event I mean to read The Riddle -- the collection in which it appears -- this month, or most of it at least. This is my "year of de la Mare," with about four books read so far.

You're sure to like "The Riddle". I've read "On the Edge", "The Return" and "Eight Tales".

jkh

I have read some twenty short stories by De La Mare and "The Vats" is definitely one of the best of them. I also have a soft spot for his tales "All-Hallows," "A.B.O.," "What Dreams May Come," "Winter," "Seaton‘s Aunt" and "Out Of The Deep. "The Return" has a good idea but is unnecessarily lenghty and boring.

There is the word "rilling" in "The Vats. I have never seen it to be used in the way De La Mare uses it in his story. What does the adjective mean in the context? A drop of water streaming down a side of the interior of one of the Vats? (Oh my God, so many ofs in just one sentence ...)


But how, it may be asked. No sound? No spectral tread? No faintest summons? And not the minutest iota of a superscription? None. I sunk my very being into nothingness, so that I seemed to become but a shell receptive of the least of whispers. But the multitudinous life that was here was utterly silent. No sigh, no ripple, no pining chime of rilling drop within. Waters of life; but infinitely still.