He came out on to the Embankment to find that it was a fine night with a light, frosty mist in the air, and he decided that he would walk home. The midnight streets of London—always so much more beautiful than the choppy crowded ones of the daytime—fascinated him. At noon London made you a present of an entertainment, rich and varied and amusing. But at midnight she made you a present of herself; at midnight you could hear her breathe.
—from The Man in the Queue, by Josephine Tey
That he could commiserate with Grant on his nonsuccess without making Grant want to hit him, was a test of his worth. Grant, in fact, turned to him in his sore state, as to someone who would understand. This was a man to whom human failure must be a very ordinary affair.
—from A Shilling for Candles, by Josephine Tey
Of course, it was only in old age that I began listening to the radio, and when I think back on my musical experiences, I see that the pleasures of broadcast or canned music are not all that significant; they didn’t make me a music lover or, in some areas, even a demi-connoisseur. No, before I began lapping up music all alone in my room, I spent decades attending hundreds of public concerts, operas, festivals, and solemn performances of church music in the “proper,” venerable places—that is, concert halls, theaters, and churches—amid a congregation of like-minded and similarly receptive souls, whose faces were attentive yet lost in contemplation, full of reverent devotion, illuminated from within, in a manner that reflects the beauty of their perceptions, and, for several measures, I paid them as much attention as the music. For decades I haven’t been able to listen tot he final chorus of St. John’s Passion without recalling a performance in the Zurich Concert Hall under the direction of Andreä. Sitting on the chair in front of me was an elderly lady whom I had hardly noticed during the concert. The last chorus had died away, and the congregation was beginning to leave, Volkmar was laying down his baton, and I, too, was taking my leave and preparing to return to the secular world, with feelings of reluctance and regret—something that happens frequently to me on such occasions—when the old lady in front arose slowly, stood there for a moment before leaving, and when she turned her head a little to one side, I could see tear after tear coursing across her cheeks.
from Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse, 1891-1962.
All through tea-time her talk ran upon the days of her childhood and youth. Perhaps this reminded her of the desirableness of looking over all the old family letters, and destroying such as ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of strangers; for she had often spoken of the necessity of this task, but had always shrunk from it, with a timid dread of something painful. To-night, however, she rose up after tea and went for them—in the dark; for she piqued herself on the precise neatness of all her chamber arrangements, and used to look uneasily at me when I lighted a bed-candle to go to another room for anything. When she returned there was a faint, pleasant smell of Tonquin beans in the room. I had always noticed this scent about any of the things which had belonged to her mother; and many of the letters were addressed to her—yellow bundles of love-letters, sixty or seventy years old.
Miss Matty undid the packet with a sigh ; but she stifled it directly, as if it were hardly right to regret the flight of time, or of life either. We agreed to look them over separately, each taking a different letter out of the same bundle and describing its contents to the other before destroying it. I never knew what sad work the reading of old letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be—at least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth, I should have felt less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been, more so. I saw the tears stealing down the wellworn furrows of Miss Matty’s cheeks, and her spectacles often wanted wiping. I trusted at last that she would light the other candle, for my own eyes were rather dim, and I wanted more light to see the pale, faded ink ; but no, even through her tears, she saw and remembered her little economical ways.
from Cranford and Other Tales, by Elizabeth Gaskell
Hence it was that, when I picked up my morning paper and read in great flaring head-lines on the front page that Mrs. Burlingame’s diamond stomacher had been stolen from her at her Onyx Cottage at Newport, I smiled broadly, and slapped the breakfast-table so hard in my satisfaction that even the shredded-wheat biscuits flew up into the air and caught in the chandelier.
—from R. Holmes & co: Being the Remarkable Adventures of Raffles Holmes, Esq., Detective and Amateur Cracksman by Birth, by John Kendrick Bangs
Beside me on the bus my mother fumes in her old muskrat coat with her hair standing up like angry black flames around the red toque. I have forced her to go. What intoxication to find I can assert and insist now, as if absence had turned into authority! She argued, she pleaded, she made excuses. She said she had a headache, a stomachache. Her feet hurt. Next week would be better. Ah, the sharp salty pleasure of forcing someone to do something you consider good for her. I am mothering my mother with all the harsh efficiency she has often used on me.
from Braided Lives, by Marge Piercy
It is pleasant, is it not,to linger outside the door that opens to the parking lotof this small strip mall beside this secondary roadand look upon the scattered cars all come to rest herelike boats in China, floating on a quiet evening tide.
He was behaving as though he had never been out in the rain before. It had rained quite often in St. Fabien, indeed there were times when it seemed never to do anything else. But rain there had been a very different matter, veiling the melancholy quayside, clanking on the roofs of the rabble of tin church premises, and churning the soft grit of the roads into mud. It had rained in St. Fabien and he had constantly been out in it, but with no more ecstasy than he had known when it rained in Hornsey. No doubt the ownership of a rain-gauge accounted for much; but there was more to it than that—a secret core of delight, a sense of truancy, of freedom, because now for the first time in his life he was walking in the rain entirely of his own accord, and not because it was his duty, or what public opinion conceived to be so.
from Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
The Minor Pleasures of Life 