The diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

64

text excerpt

The air was warm and sweet with wax candles. We sat at the West end, while Boris Ord played (first something I didn't know, then the Fantasia in G, with the roulades escaping on iron pinions after the pause) and the light in the organ sent an enormous rod of shadow along the roof...There was an interval of conversational voices, and he began to extemporise.  I thought I should never hear that again, and in that terrific tunnel of dark masonry with its one useless shaft of light piercing the upper dark, it was like a Donne poem and a funeral.  Just at the end, or rather just as one felt the end, he let off for a minute and then started the theme on all the most tigerish and domineering reeds - a last jutting-out rock of a mainland - and then away in a pianissimo. Nothing really has altered. I listened with the old obedient ears, the old destined flesh. Only now I hear with a deeper sound-abyss below me, a more closely-encompassing darkness, and both accepted. It was beyond all my dreams, to be listening to music so, in the dark of that ancient and bare building( for the glassiness of perp: gives it by height an austerity which in a way rather frowned down the baroque arabesques of the J.S.B.), and all the day was heavenly...

excerpt from 'The diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner' pp. 64 (233 words)

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