This was perhaps, in some way, the sweetest November I have had. Usually Novembers are very depressing for me, but this one went smoothly with a lot of lovely surprises and lovely conversation with lovely people, or should I say – a lovely person. I enjoyed reading John Fowles’ novella “The Ebony Tower” and also Guillaume Apollinaire’s erotic, but also sometimes funny in its exaggeration, novel “The Amorous Exploits of a Young Rakehell“. Poetry by Lermontov and Pushkin, read in bed by a light of a single pink candle, have given me solace in these drab and rainy November nights. I loved getting lost in the fog and noticing the last roses blooming, feeling sad because their soft, velvety petals will soon fall into muddy ground covered in wet, decaying leaves. And how sad the gardens and orchards, blooming but months ago, look now! The sadness and the sense of ending that November brings can be very poetic and even catharsic if used in a right way. I must thank my reader and her lovely blog “At the Sunny Side – Where Truth and Beauty Meet” because it is on her blog that I discovered this lovely quote by Goethe bellow.
“I will know how much you gave me
just by sometimes being near.”
(Julio Cortázar, If I Have To Live Without You, Translated from Spanish by Paul Weinfield, © 2017)
“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
(Goethe)
“O, how revolting reality! How can it compare with dreams?”
(Nikolai Gogol, Nevsky Prospect)
Marianne Faithfull photographed by Gered Mankowitz at the Salisbury Pub, 1964
Picture found here.
Alphonse Mucha, Stained-glass windows for the Fouquet shop, c. 1915
Osijek, Croatia, Leaf art by Nicola Faller of Slama Art project, August 2021.
Natalia Drepina (@yourschizophrenia)
A fall of Ginko leaves hand engraved by Maison Pouenat in bronze, gold, copper and green designed by Laura Gonzalez
Alphonse Mucha, Stained-glass windows for the Fouquet shop, c. 1915
“Beyond a haze of yellow flowers, the Beatles and their womenfolk (above, from left, Paul and his girl friend, John, George, Ringo and their wives) struck a lightly brooding pose with their new guru— Indian mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.” — Life, 8 September 1967.
Marbled endpaper, Source
Alfa Castaldi – Viviane Fauny & Lynn Sutherland (Vogue Italia 1970)
Multicoloured sunset over frozen Tempelfjord, Source here.
Marbled endpaper.
Instagram: elise.buch
Artist: Henri Privat-Livemont (1861 — 1936)
Date: 1900
Image by Nicolas Gras
Zandra Rhodes Ad (1971)
1974. Marianne starring in the theatre play ‘The Collector’ in 1974
Marianne Faithfull photographed by John Cowan, 1966.
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The grounds of Gwydir Castle near to Llanrwst, County Conwy, in North Wales. Artist: 
Byron's muse 