Currently reading 'Sea and Sardinia' by DH Lawrence. I've got it in the book above which also contains 'Twilight in Italy' and 'Sketches of Etruscan Places'.
I'm almost halfway through 'Sea and Sardinia' and I'm now warming to its stream of ethnographic-type images as Lawrence arrives in Cagliari with 'q-b' and they proceed to work their way inland, stopping off at several villages, on various forms of caterpillar-type transport.
Lawrence creates an interesting background as he is always describing the landscapes he and 'q-b' pass though: going up mountain slopes; through cornfields reminiscent of England; through forests; through open land etc.
Two great scenes so far, the first being when Lawrence and 'q-b' encounter a tipsy, travelling pedlar in a dungeon-type room in a hovel of a village hotel. Here, Lawrence is watching others cook meat on an open fire, and is mesmerised by a hearty-looking, tipsy, travelling pedlar who enters the dark room to cook sausage. Lawrence is fascinated to learn that the pedlar sleeps on the floor of the dungeon-type room (and other such rooms round Sardinia) on a rush mat for a small fee as he works purely to keep himself in alcohol, all he wants from life. Besides this, there is a great description of a procession with a statue of St. Anthony of Padua weaving its way up a slope to an old church where the colours of the landscape and the people in the procession seem to merge into each other perfectly, in rhythmical harmony.
Of course, every so often, Lawrence being Lawrence, he adores the primal consciousness that he observes in the Sardinian peasants, while lamenting how self-conscious his Western world has become.
Just a few of my thoughts on 'Sea and Sardinia' as I continue reading it in a fractured way, either for a few minutes late at night or on the underground travelling round Warsaw. Why does life have to be so frenetic?
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