A little before twilight one Christmas eve, [he] shouldered his spade, lighted his lantern, and betook himself towards the old churchyard, for he had got a grave to finish by next morning, and feeling very low he thought it might raise his spirits perhaps, if he went on with his work at once. As he wended his way, up the ancient street, he saw the cheerful light of the blazing fires gleam through the old casements, and heard the loud laugh and the cheerful shouts of those who were assembled around them; he marked the bustling preparations for next day’s good cheer, and smelt the numerous savoury odours consequent thereupon, as they steamed up from the kitchen windows in clouds. All this was gall and wormwood to the heart of [the man]; and as groups of children, bounded out of the houses, tripped across the road, and were met, before they could knock at the opposite door, by half a dozen curly-headed little rascals who crowded round them as they flocked up the stairs to spend the evening in their Christmas games, [he] smiled grimly, and clutched the handle of his spade with a firmer grasp, as he thought of measles, scarlet-fever, thrush, hooping-cough, and a good many other sources of consolation beside.

The answer to last week’s challenge was Before the Ice is in the Pools by Emily Dickinson.

That’s it for 2009. Wishing you a very happy holiday season from everyone at ORbits!

Before the ice is in the pools,

Before the skaters go,

Or any cheek at nightfall

is tarnished by the snow,

…

Before the fields have finished,

Before the Christmas tree,

Wonder upon wonder

Will arrive to me!

…

What we touch the hems of

On a summer’s day;

What is only walking

Just a bridge away;

…

That which sings so, speaks so,

When there’s no one here,—

Will the frock I wept in

Answer me to wear?

The answer to last week’s challenge was Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.

One major difference was that the kids here, though easily as thick, were much more docile and well-behaved. Actually doing schoolwork was acceptable. The teachers were okay; my interest in nature and wildlife were positively encouraged. They were nice to me, my accent mattered less to the teachers in South Africa than it had done to those in my native city. Once I got over this culture shock, I found myself relishing the acquisition of knowledge. Schoolwork became interesting and I lost my urge to escape into the Silver Surfer and my other comic-book fantasies. I couldn’t learn enough about things. I had, for the first time, ambition of a sort. Before, when people had asked me what I wanted to be, I would have just shrugged; I might have said a soldier, just because it seemed good fun shooting at people, like just a daft kid’s thing. Now I was into being a zoologist. On my eleventh birthday I could see possibilities: good grades here, followed by the same at high school, a university place at Witwatesrand or Pretoria or Rand Afrikaans studying zoology or biology, then some field work, post-grad stuff, and there I’d be. I saw a career path.

The old man’s piss-up blew that away.

The answer to last week’s challenge was Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.

“Comparing seeds. Trying experiments
……in salting them to see if they’d survive
floating across an ocean”.
……To, for instance, the Galapagos.

“Have begun, at last, my species book. Shall call it
……Natural Selection“. His secret step in argument.
Twenty years of evidence. Orchids, barnaclesShall call it
……and pigeons. The heart dances in its cave.

He meets the holes of his eyes in darkling glass
……against the winter garden. No one awake.
Slow embers in the grate. The dog, a warm
……white ammonite, curled

in her basket by his feet. Dawn fog dissolves
……among the medlars into a wraith
you see, then lose, in the shape
……of a running girl.
.

The answer to last week’s challenge was Happy Families by Carlos Fuentes.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.

At nightfall, [he] went out for a walk. A desire both determining and difficult led him to Avenida Álvaro Obregón and the place where the luxurious movie house Balmori had once been located.

Now it was an empty lot where metal ruins stood. Twilight birds flew over the site as if looking for a nest in memories of yesterday. Greta Garbo.  That unrepeatable smell of celluloid, sticky muégano candy, melting chocolates, programs made of pink-coloured paper, sounds like a bird’s wings. That first touch of hands watching Fred and Ginger dance against a background of snow falling in Manhattan. Greta, Ginger, Fred. As he looked at the ruined theatre, [he] felt that the models we admire and pursue come out of ourselves. They are not imposed on us. We invent them, and they magically, gracefully appear on a white screen. Except they are our own shadows transformed into light. They are our most satisfactory portrait. They remain young even in death.

“I wander the streets like a ghost. I’ve left my image in a ruined movie house. Come and acknowledge it if you dare. I’ve lost everything but the memory of you. I no longer have a body. What I have is the desire to see you again, to talk to you again.

The answer to last week’s challenge was Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.

When Christmas preparations began in earnest, and I was set to decorate the mess-tent with palms and streamers, and to make jellies and huge fruit salads for the men’s special teas, the memory of the previous year, with its similar activities so blindly and cheerfully performed in the very hour of [his] death, came back like the dull ache of an old shattering wound. In the middle of the bright, noisy kitchen, with the Home Sister issuing orders in her harsh, melancholy voice, and the Maltese maids around her chattering like monkeys, it was sometimes difficult to prevent an inconvenient tear from falling into the pail of fruit salad.

‘I wonder where he is – and if he is at all’, I soliloquised in my diary, for there was now no one within several hundred miles to whom such personal speculations could be expressed. ‘I wonder if he sees me writing this now. It’s absurd to say time makes one forget; I miss him as much as ever I did. One recovers from the shock, just as one gradually would get used to managing with one’s left hand if one had lost one’s right, but one never gets over the loss, for one is never the same after it. I have got used to facing the long empty years ahead of me if I survive the War, but I have always before me the realisation of how empty they are and will be, since he will never be there again’.

The answer to last week’s challenge was The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.

Her course was in the direction of the small undying fire which had drawn the attention of the men…in the valley below. A faint illumination from its rays began to grow upon her face, and it increased in definiteness as she drew nearer. The fire soon revealed itself to be lit, not on the level ground, but on a salient corner or redan of earth, at the junction of two converging bank fences. Outside was a ditch, dry except immediately under the fire, where there was a large pool, bearded all round by heather and rushes. In the smooth water of the pool the fire appeared upside down.

The banks meeting behind were bare of a hedge, save such as was formed by disconnected tufts of furze, standing upon stems along the top, like impaled heads above a city wall. A white mast, fitted up with spars and other nautical tackle, could be seen rising against the dark clouds whenever the flames played brightly enough to reach it. Altogether the scene had much the appearance of a fortification upon which had been kindled a beacon fire.

The answer to last week’s challenge was The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.

Hideous, she thought, and then thought that if the house burned away someday the tower would still stand, gray and forbidding over the ruins, warning people away from what was left…with perhaps a stone fallen here and there, so owls and bats might fly in and out and nest among the books below. Halfway up windows began, thin angled slits in the stone, and she wondered what it would be like, looking down from them, and wondered that she had not been able to enter the tower. I will never look down from those windows, she thought, and tried to imagine the narrow iron stairway going up and around inside. High on top was a conical wooden roof, topped by a wooden spire. It must have been laughable in any other house, but here…it belonged, gleeful and expectant, awaiting perhaps a slight creature creeping out from the little window onto the slanted roof, reaching up to the spire, knotting a rope…

The answer to last week’s challenge was The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.

Once again, ORbits offers you the opportunity to test your knowledge of all things literary. To commemorate the late Sir Ludovic Kennedy, author and tireless campaigner against miscarriages of justice, this week’s passage comes from a classic crime novel rooted in true events:

I knew that he would eat me alive. I knew that losing to a taco bender would ruin my local celebrity. I knew that running from the fight would hurt me, but fighting it would kill me. I started looking for a place to run to. The army, navy and marines looked good, then Pearl Harbor got bombed and made them look great. Then the old man had a stroke, lost his job and pension and started sucking baby food through a straw. I got a hardship deferment and joined the Los Angeles Police Department.

I saw where my thoughts were going. FBI goons were asking me if I considered myself a German or an American, and would I be willing to prove my patriotism by helping them out. I fought what was next by concentrating on my landlady’s cat stalking a bluejay across the garage roof.

The answer to last week’s challenge was Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.

Once again, ORbits offers you the opportunity to test your knowledge of all things literary.  Hot on the heels of Wolf Hall, this week’s passage comes from a previous Man Booker Prize winner:

It had seemed, for the year or so in which I had been there, merely a backcloth, that country. I had been dropped into its heat and dust and smells and they became a fortuitous appendage to the more urgent matter of war. You learned to cope with it – the discomforts and obstructions and hazards – and got on with what mattered. The British army superimposed itself on the landscape and the society: its lorries jammed the roads, its depots littered the delta from Cairo to Alexandria, its personnel filled the streets and cafés of Cairo with English voices. The speech of Lancashire, of Dorset, of the East End, of Eton and Winchester, rang around the mosques and bazaars, the Pyramids and the Citadel. Cairo, polyglot and multi-racial, both absorbed and ignored what had happened. At one level the place exploited and manipulated the situation, at another it simply went on doing what it had always done. The rich got richer, the poor continued to wade in the mud of the canals, make fuel out of buffalo dung and beg in the streets.

The answer to last week’s contest was Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.

This week’s answer, and another challenge, on ORbits next week.