"The Blue Flower"

[fiefoe]

For such a mystic title, the novel is so warmly domestic that I'm content to stay with that physical world with "cherries dark as leaves or starlings, the amarelles for Kirsch the darkest of all, fiery schnaps flavoured with peppermint, all the better for the seething of a pig’s neck fat, ears and nostrils." Candia McWilliam picked out so many quiet themes in Penelope Fitzgerald's slim book that I wonder how much of the iceberg I usually miss.

• Ruskin, who would describe, ‘with keenest relish’, the joy of shelling peas—‘the pop which assures one of a successful start, the fresh colour and scent of the juicy row within, and the pleasure of skilfully scooping the bouncing peas with one’s thumb into the vessel by one’s side’.
• the intermittent transformative sense that beauty is where it falls; that everything is illuminated.
• She plucks life of its feathery detail, as with the geese at Tennstedt, stripped of their down alive twice before slaughter.
• ‘Terminal illness is a great simplifier of daily life, everything being reduced to the same point of hope against hope.’
• Sheets, wearing thin, turned sides to middle, by now a colour milder than white, through which the broad summer sunshine may be seen, outlive the human souls

‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.'

• Dietmahler’s own mother supervised the washing three times a year, therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four months only. He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more.
• ‘Fritz, how many are there in your family?’ asked Dietmahler. ‘So many things?’ Then he  shouted suddenly: ‘There is no such concept as a thing in itself!’
• Have you thought the washbasket? Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be on that that thought the washbasket!’
• ‘I will send for the housekeeper.’ ‘But we don’t need her,’ said Erasmus. ‘You have your own keys to the dining room surely.’ ‘Surely I have,’ she said, looking at him imploringly. ‘No, I have them,’ said Sidonie. ‘I have had them ever since my sister was married.
• ‘His clothes! It is still far too cold to undress at night. / by the light of a candle fitted with a reflector. / Each unhooked the little penny inkwell on a spike from behind a lapel of his jacket.
• Impatience, translated into spiritual energy, raced through all the young Hardenbergs.
• 'I took the opportunity. Opportunity, after all, is only another word for temptation.’
• ‘What would it matter if I did?’ squeaked the Bernhard. ‘You said once that death was not significant, but only a change in condition.’
• He could not warm to children, since all of them were scribblers in books.
• when the proprietor had died, had married his widow and come into the whole property. Of course the whole of Weissenfels knew this and approved of it. It was their idea of wisdom exactly.
• Bernhard continued to complain about the loss of his red Mütze. It was the only thing he had possessed which indicated his revolutionary sympathies.
• ‘In a republic there would be no possessions,’ said the Bernhard.
• the Moravian Brethren, for whom every soul is either dead, awakened, or converted.
• It was also a place of total obedience, for the meek are the inheritors.
• she received a faltering glow, like an uncertain hour of winter sunshine, from the idea of there being so many things and so many people quite close at hand.
• The Freiherr wrote to his brother to thank him for his hospitality, and to regret that he could not thank him more.
• said Fritz. ‘Luck has its rules, if you can understand them
• Then he said, ‘I shall not touch another newspaper until the French nation returns to its senses again.’
• she knew, with the insight of long habit, so much more reliable than love
• Fichte was speaking of the philosophy of Kant, which, fortunately, he had been able to improve upon greatly. Kant believed in the external world. Even though it is only known to us through our senses and our own experience, still, it is there. This, Fichte was saying, was nothing but an old man’s weakness.
• But he held that to be alive was not a natural state, and to prevent immediate collapse the constitution must be held in perpetual balance by a series of stimuli, either jacking it up with alcohol, or damping it down with opium.
• ‘Put them in your mouth,’ said Dietmahler. ‘If they are kept warm I can perhaps sew them back on our return.’ Fritz was not likely to forget the sensation of the one and a half fingers and the heavy ring, smooth and hard while they were yielding, in his mouth.
• daily life—the shit house, the fever ward, the route march, foot inspection. Later, when I see action, I shall have nothing to fear, because life, after all, is a goal, not a means.
• How old was the Gaul? Age had brought him cunning, rather than wisdom, and he had arrived with his master at an elaborate creaturely bargain as to place and time—when he might slow down, when he might stop, when consent to go on.
• waterside inns where the customers sat placidly hour after hour, waiting for the fish to be caught from the river and broiled.
• Electricity was sometimes visible as light, but not all light was visible, indeed most of it was not.
• The children of large families hardly ever learn to talk to themselves aloud, that is one of the arts of solitude, but they often keep diaries.