Origins of Wednesday xlix: What are we reading?

An enviable weekend estate,

sited with long experience

of the limits of the tides,

open to the breezes and yet

the comfy sort of bunker we

might expect Ratty or Moley

to improvise, given a suit-

ably provisioned hamper. He

is a contemporary of mine,

enjoying swimming off an is-

land in Germany, a pleasure

I've shared elsewhere at his

latitude. Accosting one an-

other, inevitably our conver-

sation shifts from remarking

on the light, to what he is

reading by the lantern, ex-

hibited lower left, upright. 

We never erect such a blithe-

ly spare redoubt, without a

volume to explore in those

settings. I wouldn't mention

it, but I'm off for a while

by the Elizabeth River as it

flows into the Atlantic, off 

Virginia, of busy days and i-

solated nights, and I've hit

upon a kind of instinctive in-

clination to nestle into the

grit and wit of Dashiell Ham-

mett after many years, in The

Thin Man before W.S. van Dyke. 

But I know the story, and can 

defy how it's told. Its shel-

ter sequesters one well for a

luxuriance in closeness with a

riotous imagination, a quality

of the aedicule in architecture

I've cited fondly long ago, of

undying, inherent delight, in

support of innocuously raucous 

habitation of mind; by Sterne,

Kenneth Grahame, Dash Hammett -

play has found its tent, and

architecture, too, itself. 

An island

Germany 

1960's