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Читаю вторую книгу Эдмунда де Вааля «Белая дорога».
Это полуавтобиографическая и научно-популярная книга об истории фарфора и его изобретении. Я бы сказала, что эта книга - путешествие де Вааля по следам его одержимости белым фарфором.
Я купила бумажное издание с иллюстрациями. К сожалению, очень очень мелкий текст. Поэтому читаю с большими перерывами.
Выписала много интересного и буду постепенно выкладывать некоторые заинтересовавшие меня цитаты.
*****
Porcelain is the Arcanum. It is a mystery. For 500 years no one in the West knew how porcelain is made. The word Arcanum, a jumble of Latin consonants, is pleasingly close to Arcady, Arcadia. There must be some kinship, I feel, between the first secret of white porcelain, and the promise of fulfilled desire, a kind of Arcadia[…].
I have a plan to get to three places where porcelain was invented, or reinvented, three white hills in China and Germany and England. Each of them matters to me. I have known of them for decades from pots and books and stories but I have never visited.
I need to get to these places, need to see how porcelain looks under different skies, how white changes with the weather. Other things in the world are white but, for me, porcelain comes first. This journey is a paying of dues to those that have gone before[…].
Any obsession with porcelain echoes as much as any Venetian alleyway.
John Donne movingly writes in his ‘Elegy on the Lady Markham’, of her transformation in the earth, that when you lose something precious to sight, something rarer and more beautiful can be created: ‘As men of China, after an age’s stay, / Do take up porcelain, where they buried clay’.
*****
( Edmund de Waal )
Это полуавтобиографическая и научно-популярная книга об истории фарфора и его изобретении. Я бы сказала, что эта книга - путешествие де Вааля по следам его одержимости белым фарфором.
Я купила бумажное издание с иллюстрациями. К сожалению, очень очень мелкий текст. Поэтому читаю с большими перерывами.
Выписала много интересного и буду постепенно выкладывать некоторые заинтересовавшие меня цитаты.
*****
Porcelain is the Arcanum. It is a mystery. For 500 years no one in the West knew how porcelain is made. The word Arcanum, a jumble of Latin consonants, is pleasingly close to Arcady, Arcadia. There must be some kinship, I feel, between the first secret of white porcelain, and the promise of fulfilled desire, a kind of Arcadia[…].
I have a plan to get to three places where porcelain was invented, or reinvented, three white hills in China and Germany and England. Each of them matters to me. I have known of them for decades from pots and books and stories but I have never visited.
I need to get to these places, need to see how porcelain looks under different skies, how white changes with the weather. Other things in the world are white but, for me, porcelain comes first. This journey is a paying of dues to those that have gone before[…].
Any obsession with porcelain echoes as much as any Venetian alleyway.
John Donne movingly writes in his ‘Elegy on the Lady Markham’, of her transformation in the earth, that when you lose something precious to sight, something rarer and more beautiful can be created: ‘As men of China, after an age’s stay, / Do take up porcelain, where they buried clay’.
*****
( Edmund de Waal )
