Rain in Florence

Saturday, April 9th., Pension White, Florence.

It has been raining for days. Yesterday, to get out of the rain I walked about in the church of S. Croce to collect my ideas for the third part of "Clayhanger". For this purpose I found it to be a very good, spacious church. Funny to be immersed mentally in the doings of the Five Towns in a place like this which couldn't be much more different. I bought a copy of Ruskin's "Mornings in Florence" today. Weather too wet and me too buried in writing for any excursions.

There is a professor from Toronto University staying here. Came into the smoking room last evening. Lounge suit, dirty brown boots, small piercing eyes. Took no notice of me though the room was not twelve foot square until he found he hadn't a match, when he said abruptly, and in a tone which expected only one answer: "Can I trouble you for a match?" This casualness was geberal with him. You could trace it in the way he sat on a chair. Seemed an impatient sort. Then began to talk of Egyptian tombs in a very sensible, interesting and friendly way. When he is not interested it does not occur to him to pretend to be. If a remark does not strike him as fruitful he quite naturally says nothing at all. It is brusqueness, but has a good foundation. I admire it in a way; a sort of intellectual honesty. I am probably similar myself by nature but have had 'good manners' drummed into me over the years. Similar age to me I should think. Somebody told me he is a professor of English literature; but I don't know.

I put on my largest overcoat and walked to the Cascine this morning and this afternoon I went to inspect the Palazzo Strozzi for my article "Night and Morning in Florence", of which I wrote 2,200 words today. I also went into the church of S. Annunziata. We should have been going to the opera this evening but Grierson and Mock are both indisposed.

 

Mysterious person

Sunday,  April 3rd., Pension White, Florence.

Wet morning. Uffizzi. Great struggling crowd at the vestiaire. I only went in to get a first impression of the gallery: not of the pictures. Immense staircase to climb: it corrects your inadequate notion of the size of the building. A general impression of carelessness & poverty in the housing of the collection. Irregularity of rooms, etc. One feels that such a collection ought to be housed if not with grandeur and splendour, at any rate with a certain conventional distinction. Great crowds in the principal rooms. In this house of pictures, all turns & corners, some of the pictures are absolutely in the dark. I took the covered gallery to the Pitti. Too tired when I reached there, to look at anything. I went out into the rain. Called at S. Trinita during a mass, made a sketch, and walked home in the rain.

Lunch yesterday with Francis Grierson at Pension Paoli. He still looks astoundingly young. His wig was curiously long, his moustache of course dyed. But he had not the skin, wrinkles, nor above all the gestures of a very old man. He can't be far off seventy. he may be more than seventy. He said he seldom went out now, and would not dress for dinner under any circumstances. Therefore ate in his room in the hotel. Ate little. He had very good ideas about food and general management of the physical machine. Mysterious person. When I asked him if the New Age paid him for his articles he said no, "somebody else pays me". He said he could not work for nothing now, and vaguely that he had lost his money.

Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard (1848 – 1927) was a composer and pianist, who also wrote under the pen name of Francis Grierson. He was born in Birkenhead, England, but his family migrated to Illinois, United States while Jesse was still a baby. Shepard traveled in Europe, finding audiences even among royalty, and impressed the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, fils. Shepard was involved withSpiritualism and stated that many of his musical performances were the result of the spirits of famous composers channeling through him. He was invited to live in San Diego by a pair of real-estate developers, the High brothers, who enticed him by promising to build a mansion to his specifications. The result was the Villa Montezuma (named after the ocean liner which brought Shepard to America). Shepard died while giving a piano performance.

Additionally for April 3rd., see 'Living for today'

Every morning just now I say to myself: Today, not tomorrow, is the day you have to live, to be happy in. Just as complete materials for being happy today as you will ever have. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Live as though this day is your last of joy. "How obvious, if thought about" - yet it is just what we forget. Sheer M. Aurelius, of course.