Welcome to Number Twenty-Five of Gloomscapes. This will be the last post for a while, as I’m taking a break from the series, to gather some new material and ideas for the future.
And it couldn’t be any other way than ending it with the very best–The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
And there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
More brutalistic architecture today; this time a canteen of an office building. I was thinking of the canteen in George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, though that one was underground.
The lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin.
This was also the place where Winston and Julia arranged their first date, over spoonfuls of stew.
The title of today’s post comes from–guess who–my favourite heroine, Anne Shirley aka Anne of Green Gables. A June Evening is a name of a chapter of the third book, Anne of the Island. Here I give you some of my photographs taken this month:
Anne: “I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.”
Marilla: “You’d get tired of it.”
Anne: “I daresay, but just now I feel that it would take me a long time to get tired of it, if it were all as charming as today. Everything loves June.”
~LM Montgomery
I think it’s great that Anne has appreciation for living in a world where there are Junes as well as Octobers!
And how about you, dear reader? Do you also love the month of June and wish it went on for longer? Or do you prefer the cooler months? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Today, I’m pleased to present number Twenty in my Gloomscapes series.
To mark this occasion, I have decided for something less gloomy, maybe even a bit fun–and a dialogue from my favourite YA dystopian series.
“Think about it. People used to ride that thing. For fun,” says Will, shaking his head.
“They must have been Dauntless,” I say.
“Yeah, but a lame version of Dauntless. “Christina laughs. “A Dauntless Ferris wheel wouldn’t have cars. You would just hang on tight with your hands, and good luck to you.”
We walk down the side of the pier. All the buildings on my left are empty, their signs torn down and their windows closed, but it is a clean kind of emptiness. Whoever left these places left them by choice and at their leisure. Some places in the city are not like that.
~Veronica Roth, Divergent
#KeepOnGloomin’
The world in the Divergent series is a city divided into five factions. The above mentioned Dauntless are one them. They’re the brave ones; Abnegation are the selfless, Candor the honest, Erudite the ones that value knowledge and Amity are the hippies. Then there are the factionless, who don’t fit into any faction and live on the fringes of the society. I’m a definite Erudite myself, though I think the Dauntless are the coolest ones.
Hello world, it’s Sunday again, which means Gloomscapes.
Lucky number thirteen it is today and so it has to be, of course, District 13 from the Hunger Games trilogy.
A mockingjay. Just a glimpse of it as it flies by. The same one every time.
~Susan Collins, Catching Fire (Hunger Games #2)
Mockingjay is, in the Hunger Games universe, a fictional hybrid bird, which becomes a symbol of Resistance. It’s also the title of the third book. When I viewed this picture on my computer and saw the flying bird, I was immediately reminded of the above quote from Catching Fire. I’m glad I got a chance to post it on the blog finally!
Without further ado, here is Number Nine in the Gloomscapes series.
Today it’s abandoned shopping trolleys–or shopping carts if you prefer.
The clocks stopped at one seventeen. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. I think it’s October but I can’t be sure. I haven’t kept a calendar for years. Each day is more grey than the one before. It is cold and growing colder as the world slowly dies. No animals have survived, and all the crops are long gone. Someday all the trees in the world will fall. The roads are peopled by refugees towing carts, and gangs carrying weapons, looking for fuel and food.
~from the movie The Road
And now, all that is left is empty shopping carts.
What are you wearing today? Chances are, if you work in a standard office:
Obviously, it’s a cinema ticket for Black Panther (which I saw a week ago, but it was too late to post it on that day and dammit, I said Random and Weird Phone Shots are a Thursday thing). See what I have become? This shit post proves I have completely lost it.
Black Panther might be a candidate for the movie of the year and it’s only February. I just want to mention something that occurs, well, something he says at the end, so here is when I say spoiler, if you haven’t seen it and want to–stop reading now.
In the first post-credits scene T’Challa (aka Black Panther) speaks at the United Nations and has this to say–paraphrasing here, so it’s not 100% exact: “Wise man builds bridges, fool builds barriers.”
Well it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these! Late to the party but here it is:
No noise allowed
The hardest thing about this Weekly Photo Challenge has been choosing the right picture–I have so many that would qualify. In the end this one won. This little piece of woodland is Prestwich Clough in Manchester and I discovered it in April 2017.
It’s amazing how quiet a place in a city, that is not even very far from a main road can be. It must be the trees.
I remember reading a children’s story back in my home country about a guy who collected silence and he had this big house with many rooms and every room had a different type of silence. Forest silence, beach silence, field silence, cave silence and so on and so on. Anne Shirley in Anne of Windy Poplars also talks about different types of silence in her letter to Gilbert.
I’m sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell just where I was by the quality of the silence about me.
So it’s never a total silence then. I imagine that would only be in space.
Break the Silence
I’ve been going back and forth with this paragraph, typing and deleting, typing again and deleting again. This is only a photo posting challenge, nothing more but even Cheri asks at the end of her post whether silence can be a negative thing. Because I believe it can (in a different sense than my photograph) and I was thinking about the #MeToo movement and other horrible things that have been happening and are happening, so I just want to add this: if you see a case of injustice happening, please do speak up.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
~Martin Luther King, Jr
