People flicker around me

Sauntering the pavement, or riding the country by-road—lo! such faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality!
The spiritual, prescient face—the always welcome, common, benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges, broad at the back-top;
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows
—the shaved blanch’d faces of orthodox citizens;
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face;
The ugly face of some beautiful Soul,
the handsome detested or despised face;
The sacred faces of infants,
the illuminated face of the mother of many children;

The face of an amour, the face of veneration;
The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock;
The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face;
A wild hawk, his wings clipp’d by the clipper;
A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs and knife of the gelder.

Sauntering the pavement, thus, or crossing the ceaseless ferry, faces, and faces, and faces!
I see them, and complain not, and am content with all.

~ Walt Whitman ~

Of the visage of things.....

This post is for the anonymous reader who asked me about "Willow Banks" on 14th February 2009. I dug around a bit (admittedly, only casually) and was unable to come up with anything solid other than its year of construction (1871). I found no photographs of the older building, no facts.

To a lay visitor's mind, the term "heritage" has special meaning . It has come to indicate those properties which have been lovingly maintained and/or restored by their owners to their original glory. It tells us that these buildings are, at least in large part, the same as what they were when first constructed. It says to us, "come step in, and savour history".
The owners use the word "heritage" literally: as something that comes or belongs to one by reason of birth or something that has been or may be inherited by legal descent or succession! Yes, in that sense, they are right. It is a heritage property! But it is a bit tough to believe your eyes when you read that building was constructed over 130 years , for it has little to show by way of its undoubtedly rich history. If anything, someone should be prosecuted for having so completely despoiled the original in order to create this concrete horror. Looking at it is sheer visual masochism. One can only wonder what the interiors are like....

This is the frontage:


This is a view of the side that leads up to the Mall:


I'm tempted to quote Whitman when he says:
"Of the visage of things - And of piercing through to the accepted hells beneath
Of ugliness - To me there is just as much in it as there is in beauty"!!!

Aren't these two aspects seen below far more fascinating?

My apologies, anonymous reader, that I could not be of much help to you.

P.S. An unsolicited suggestion. Take a look at Chapslee Palace, if only to contrast.....

Song of The Open Road

As I walk to work, I am reminded of this Walt Whitman poem:

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road...

You road I enter upon and look around! I believe you are not all that is here;
I believe that much unseen is also here.

Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference or denial;
The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied;
The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,
The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,

The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town,
They pass—I also pass—anything passes—none can be interdicted;
None but are accepted—none but are dear to me.