Beautiful songs in the air this morning. The small sopranos are sitting in every treetop doing their utmost to attract attention. I tune in to one at a time to hear if they have learned some new songs. The starlings are singing Mozart in the northeastern corner of Zealand, I heard yesterday, so the celebration of his 250th anniversary has also caught the attention of the birds. You could easily distinguish the first nine notes of Eine Kleine Nacht Music. The repertoire isn’t quite as elegant down here. Ringing tones seem to be the latest thing.

The weather is still quite cold, only around 8°C, but nice and calm. The white cherry plum tree and the faint yellow forsythias are glowing in the hazy sunlight. I planted the forsythias (intermedia ‘Lynwood’) in a sunny corner of the garden six-seven years ago. Now, they are three meters high, twice as wide and with their gorgeous yellow bloom, which never fails in our latitudes, they have become the cherished harbingers of spring.

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THE MASTER OF TEA TABLING

Christopher Isherwood's words about E.M. Foster came to mind, when I read an article (Love, actually) by Zadie Smith on Foster’s style. In his diary (standing with the other bricks on the bottom shelf of the modern section), Isherwood called him the master of tea tabling, the art of the subtle understatement. Even speaking of love, Zadie Smith seems to have no sympathy for this, accusing the man who wrote A Passage to India of deliberately withholding satisfaction. Hard words in themselves, she then goes on quoting Katherine Mansfield.

“E.M. Foster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Isn’t it beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.”

This, of course, is the young woman’s attitude, which I fully respect, though with age I have come to believe that some things are better experienced in subdued light or even in darkness. Peter Ustinov once regretfully observed, being touched by the fate of the chicken in an excellent curry he had just consumed, that “nature is both magnificent and awful, both sublime in its equilibrium and horrifying in its detail,” which is more or less what I’m driving at here, I think. There must be worse cases of emotional extremism than that of E.M. Foster.