life between the pages

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

Thursday, February 02, 2006

the unbroken circle



my sister sent the above picture to me with a reminder of how we really don't need to wear makeup.... and neither did she (who happens to be the wife of artist andrea del sarto, c. 1513 or so). don't you love the gentle way her head is crowned?

saw a fascinating movie the other night: 'iron jawed angels,' about the work of suffragettes and how women finally obtained the right to vote in america (after england and several other european nations had granted it decades before). highly recommended --and great hats!

another fascinating woman, recently the subject of a documentary on the sc public tv network: eleanor roosevelt. i was lucky enough to visit valkyll in hyde park, ny during the time it was being restored in the early 1980s. need to remember her lessons. i had always thought of her as rather dowdy but from all the original reels of news footage & photographs, that just isn't so. very often she was the only gracefully dressed person in the room, a veritable orchid surrounded by drab mens' suits. she also had some wonderful chapeaux.... whatever happened to us, that we don't dress completely anymore?

1 comment:

RaeS said...

What a lovely portrait! I don't know why we don't wear hats anymore... Seems like the only time I ever see ladies in hats is at the Kentucky Derby on tv or if the women wearing them are British doing something somewhat royal. I have a few hats, but I feel weird wearing them out places because no one else does. I'm talking about large-brimmed hats though because most hats that aren't large-brimmed do absolutely nothing to complement me personally. I have noticed though that a lot of hats are really quite expensive, which I think might contribute to how uncommon they are in every day women's dress. But I do love to look at the hats at "Hats in the Belfry" ( http://www.hatsinthebelfry.com/ )!