Gather your gossips

Weapons used abroad always come home, and weapons of the mind are no different.

In this short fable of midwinter, Susanna Clarke tells of the speech of dogs and pigs and foxes and the woods themselves, who talk to those who know how to listen.

In The Middle Passage, James Hollis writes: “Grief, for example, is the occasion for acknowledging the value of that which has been experienced.”

“Mid-way in life’s journey / I found myself in a dark wood, / having lost the way.”

In The Sea and Summer, Melbourne of the mid-twenty-first century is half buried under the rising sea.