From My Room with a View (6)

Sparkling; Come take a sip!

From my aplacecalledmerrymount.com, I connect to Annie Dillard, who passed away on September 15, 2026: 

… Writing is too hard to waste on the weirdness of your daily life, or at least on mine. I love to sock the reader into some odd time and place and let him breathe there and love it, and love the world for having such a place — and then to call for fireworks there with only a ballpoint pen. Possible books abound; I’d rather write an impossible page.  Argument is penny-ante play, or talk with tea. It is the literary, pace Julia A. Moore (‘‘the sweet singer of Michigan’’), that is ‘‘a work very difficult to do.’’ Arguing draws a line linking corridors through chaos with reason. Art, by contrast, is the whole ball of wax — a system, coherent, chopped out from chaos and held.

And so, through a photo of a glistening bottle of cherry-flavored water, I connect you to Robert Graves:

from Cherry Time

In the cherry pluckt at night, 

With the dew of summer swelling, 

There’s a juice of pure delight, 

Cool, dark, sweet, divinely smelling. 

 Merry, merry, 

 Take a cherry; 

 Mine are sounder, 

 Mine are rounder, 

 Mine are sweeter 

 For the eater 

 In the moonlight. 

And you’ll be fairies quite. 

-Robert Graves

Argument or Art?

CPW