July 2008
68 posts
I had to head back to New York today while Julian and Lily stayed behind in Martha’s Vineyard for a couple of more days. We’ve decided that we really love the island. We love it that it’s nothing like the Hamptons. It’s so much more wild and discreet. Having said that, someone told me he’s come up with a new term, “shack-teaux,” to describe some newly built luxury “shacks” that are part of a well-known power couple’s compound on the island.
“The gardener always has to look to the future.”
—Alain Baraton, head garden of Versailles, in an article on the changes he’s made at the park in reaction to the climate change.
“Memory isn’t just something, it’s everything - the sum of who we are, the glue, page and spine of our story, the repository of our identity. It’s no more than a handful of sludge but it’s also vast - a great galaxy of all we have experienced and known, constantly updating, drawing meaning from the absurd blizzard of life to make and shape and sharpen our personalities and intellects and gut feelings.”
—Phil Hogan, in a fascinating article on how our memory works, in The Observer. Like my father, who recorded our life in photographs and Super-8 films, I have tried most of my life to encode and to hold on to my memory in words, photographs, and videos.
We are in Martha’s Vineyard for an impromptu vacation in a lovely house facing the sea. I had forgotten how beautiful it is on this island in the summer. The vegetation is very much like on Long Island, but the landscape is drastically different, with hills and cliffs, and endless hidden lanes, most of the houses secretive and tucked away. Upon arriving at our house, I immediately thought of Daniel, who loves beach houses. This one has the doors and shutters painted blue, his favorite color. The path leading down to the beach is bordered on both sides by thick shrubs of Rosa Rugosa laden with big luscious rose hips in shades of orange and red. We had a lovely swim in the sea while big black cormorants hovered above waiting to catch their fish. Lily found her favorite spot to read, in the hammock overlooking the beach. After dinner, she insisted we had dessert on the lawn so we could watch the sunset. Tonight I finished Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which I had started this morning on the bus here. I love Winterson’s writing and this book, her first novel, was the only one I had never read before. Oranges is the fictional account of her growing up as an adopted daughter of evangelical parents in grim industrial Northern England. To find her way out such confining circumstances, Winterson had nothing but her gift of story-telling, which explains her abiding faith in the redemptive power of art.
