Reading the last chapter of a biography is always difficult,
because I know how it ends.
Naturally. Realistically.
Even though I am not attached to Charles Nichol’s Leonardo as I was to Irving Stone’s Michelangelo, I am still putting off reading the last few pages for another time. Reading fewer and fewer pages each day.
I could have finished the biography in the tube today, on the way home.
But associating his last years and works with a noisy and bumpy ride in a public transport just doesn’t seem quite right.
Bernini arrived two day ago, in a tidily wrapped package of reuse paper, addressed in a near-calligraphic handwriting.
I hope it hadn’t been sitting in the attic for far too long, and that the last owner had at least enjoyed flipping through it as much as I will.
Haven’t gotten a chance to study Rembrandt’s etchings and drawings much, after that first night of submerging myself into the port folio — for it was much more than a collection of copies of copies of copies… — under fluorescent light in a dingy London motel.
On a totally unrelated note, Sagan’s “Billions and Billions” and “Pale Blue Dot” are travelling from the States. His books are one of the best sources of inspiration and hunger for learning for me. Even when I had to clutch Cosmos in one hand, thumbing a dictionary in the other, and the English homework be damned.
Went on a book-shopping binge a few weeks back. The Alibris lot arrived, packed tightly in a plastic envelope, without any mishap. The Biblio small lot got stuck at Zollamt for being suspicious, of explosive perhaps, for it was an indistinct, hefty, recycled cardboard box from Sweden. No idea why it made a detour to Sweden from US of A.
