Word: lanterns
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...BLUE LANTERN, by Colette. Written when she was crippled by arthritis and dying, this is an unsentimental record of how it was with a poet of the senses whose senses were failing...
...BLUE LANTERN, by Colette. The great French novelist's last major work, written when she was crippled by arthritis, is an unsentimental record of how it was with a poet of the senses whose senses were failing...
Scratched Belly. What is fascinating in The Blue Lantern is the way Colette's belief in the unity of all tangible things served to enlarge her shrunken world. Even the fire in the grate becomes "my guest and the work of my hands; like every other animal it enjoys having its belly scratched from underneath...
During those years beneath the blue lantern, Colette held court much as Proust did in his cork-lined room. Her blue eyes ringed with kohl, her curls carefully brushed over her immense forehead, she received friends sitting up in bed, nibbling garlic and sipping champagne. But she no longer wished to meet the young: "I dread them. It is in the course of nature for declining strength to be scared of up-and-coming new forces. The children who write me letters lay claim to great timidity. But it is for those of my age to feel timidity, almost...
Joyful Cry. As in her best books-Colette's bedside world in The Blue Lantern seems paradoxically always in motion, and she ends her remarkable book with a characteristic yes to her dwindling life: "I am still going to write; for me there is no other destiny. But when does writing have an end? What is the warning sign? A trembling of the hand? I used to think that with the completed book you raise the joyful cry 'Finished!' You clap your hands, only to find pouring from them grains of sand you believed to be precious...