The World in a Wall

airandangels:

The crumbling wall that surrounded the sunken garden alongside the house was a rich hunting ground for me. It was an ancient brick wall that had been plastered over, but now this outer skin was green with moss, bulging and sagging with the damp of many winters. The whole surface was an intricate map of cracks, some several inches wide, others as fine as hairs. Here and there large pieces had dropped off and revealed the rows of rose-pink bricks lying beneath like ribs. There was a whole landscape on this wall if you peered closely enough to see it; the roofs of a hundred tiny toadstools, red, yellow, and brown, showed in patches like villages on the damper portions; mountains of bottle-green moss grew in tuffets so symmetrical that they might have been planted and trimmed; forests of small ferns sprouted from cracks in the shady places, drooping languidly like little green fountains. The top of the wall was a desert land, too dry for anything except a few rust-red mosses to live in it, too hot for anything except sun-bathing by the dragon-flies. At the base of the wall grew a mass of plants - cyclamen, crocus, asphodel - thrusting their leaves among the piles of broken and chipped roof-tiles that lay there. This whole strip was guarded by a labyrinth of blackberry hung, in season, with fruit that was plump and juicy and black as ebony.

First paragraph, Chapter 9, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.

 I can picture this very clearly. Everything. And it is awesome. If I came across this, I would be taking so many snapshots and trying to look at every inch of this place. Because I live for look at old abandoned things, because they seem to exist in a state of graceful entropy, only granted viewing to a worthy few. I blame The Secret Garden for that.

No wonder Victor doesn’t get bored easily; there’s everything to be fascinated about. Even an abandoned lot that you pass by everyday but never really notice would hold his imagination, because there would be plants, insects, and bits and ends he’d never seen before and might never see again. He would probably be enraptured if he got the chance to visit a forest or dived to see a sea bed. I can see him taking everything in, and later, trying to capture it in his drawings for others to see how he sees it.

The mind boggles at him turning that same observation on people.

(Source: airyairyquitecontrary)

NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY

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