I feel like I should work extra hard on today’s blog, on account of just breezing through it yesterday.
…I’m gonna do the weekly blog challenge, write up. The one where you have to write in the style of a favorite author. Only I’m gonna take it one further and do it while still narrating in the essay form. And I want it to be a ridiculous juxtaposition. So I’m gonna pick a wildly opposite writing influence and run with it. In short: What would SWAL sound like if Jane Austen was penning it?
It would sound like this:
***
I cannot help but wish I had not lost the funds once supporting the allowance of a servant. This morning, it was I who was left to set the tea to steep and pick the eggs. A bothersome business, when all which you desire is to rest, uncorseted between the bed linens…stretching upon occasion at your leisure.
After breakfast, a walk about the grounds, perhaps. The day is still crisp, yet the sun is out, winking through the clouds now and then. A piece of blue sky is surly somewhere to be found. It would do me well, I think, to chase it. I have only this and tomorrow for the remainder of my Holiday. A Holiday vastly having depleted of its time.
…Were I a Gentleman, none of such limitations would stand before me.
Of no profession, I would occupy myself between travels abroad for great lengths of time. Not merely for the sake of “travel,” mind you, rather for the purpose of experiencing the finer opportunities afforded to one who establishes themselves in pockets of friends, old acquaintance and new. A fortnight here or there, in country seats outside our own…a sail across seas tossed lightly in a variety of climates.
To picnic beneath an ancient tree whose seed pods float every now and then to rest on the very same blanket which I too use.
…Or a Tuscan sun, shining brightly…it’s heat soaking up into the terracotta roofing tiles, and piazza stones in the square. English Manor gardens, manicured neatly into designs brought forth perhaps one hundred years before this. Seedlings which once grew, as that one fallen from the picnicing tree, rising now to this magnificence…offset by fusias and lavenders and great bouquets of rhododendrons, reaching outwards in every direction.
I should like to touch a Grecian stone, entertain a Spanish siesta…walk an Irish rock and peat path, once again.
…If I were of another sex, in another time, with means to accomplish these efforts as my sole earthbound duty, I should be most exquisitely content.
However, it does seem that I am not any one of such things.
I must face, as I have done…with the absence of servants and coming end of Holiday leisure…that soon I must needs return to daily occupation. Of serving others in the stead of their serving me. I must face the dawn’s early hour, and chill of dew’d air, to travel outward, taking reins of my own small carriage which will draw me swiftly toward the lot I must bare in life.
…Questions, ever questions, and tasks will be demanded of me, and I shall complete them as is my duty. But I shall not draw even the slightest rise of contentment at their accomplishments. For my life seems often anything but the showing of an artistic effort when once completed. In that, at no time may one gesture with affection at a day’s work-end, as one would toward even the simplest of paintings upon a wall:
“This, I have accomplished,” I may, with satisfaction, proclaim. “This I have made.”
…A substantial object which once was a mere blank canvas, and now breathes color and light and atmos throughout your day-to-day lives.
Should I need to wake every morning, endure ice chills in winter, fingers stiff with cold, hours of wakeful unrest, worry over color mix, or stroke placement… and ration my evening’s candlelight due to price of wax thought far less precious than a stock in canvas…I should do so willingly. If such were my occupation for life, even a Holiday would take less precedence.
…Such is not the way of things, however.
No brush or pen stroke supports the means of which I live at present, and for that, I must acquiesce to find my living elsewhere.
…So too must you yourself, I fear.
…It was for such purpose, in which a “Holiday” was thence first bourne, I think. To give us rest and peace…and to dream. For dreams too, are of high importance. To aspire, in our heart and minds, toward a time and place wherein this is all but a means to something finer.
Some call it Heaven.
Some, another word or world wholly separate from this.
For me, I call it: “What can be, should we but strive hard enough to attain it.”
…An ideal which aides to sooth the burn of your contemporary circumstances, whatever they may be.
“This too shall pass,” quoth words in a promise we are all too familiar with.
…If only such application could include all, but the passing of Holidays…
~D
