Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from 'Gift from the Sea'.

'Distraction is, always has been, and probably always will be, inherent in a woman's life.

For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel.  The pattern of our lives is essentially circular.  We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive likes a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes.  How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives.

...With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women.  I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children.  It has to do primarily with distractions.  The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; the human relationships with their myriad pulls - woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. 

The problem is not merely on of 'Woman and Career', 'Woman and the Home', 'Woman and Independence'.  It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.'

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, extract from, Gift from the Sea.

Ralph Fiennes, by Julie Kavanagh.

On performing Oedipus ...

Now Fiennes’s fear was palpable, with a physical language of agony, like a Bacon painting; his barely audible “Not yet, not yet” sparking the ineffable shiver released by a great performance. The audience was silent, drawn into the moment, but at the end let rip with whoops and whistles, recalling the cast on stage again and again. Sophie Fiennes went twice and said that one performance was the most extraordinary she had ever seen. “It was not acting, it was being. It was a leap of faith, like jumping from one building to another. Ralph had dared to enter that state. Afterwards I told him, ‘Jini’s certainly gone to heaven now!’ Because she would have loved the play, she would have loved his courage on that night.”

From Two Years With Ralph Fiennes, by Julie Kavanagh.

A brilliant article, a brilliant man and the photographer too ... I had to put it someplace safe.

Photograph Jillian Edelstein.