FancyPoetryParts

Here is my favourite of all favourites of diary entries.  It was written by A C Benson in 1912

“Riviera Palace Hotel, Penzance
There is a constant drift of newcomers…. A dreary red-nosed dyspeptic clergyman at one table, at another a young man who smiles brilliantly to himself, at another a gloomy whiskered man, with brows drawn up and corrugated with care, who feeds himself carefully and compassionately and takes salt with his bananas - I like to watch all his little ways and manners; at another an elderly couple, a gross slow-moving old man, and a haughty female who has once been beautiful and now looks unutterably bored.  A shifting pageant of human lives, like a big hotel, isn’t a very encouraging affair.  It doesn’t give one the idea that life is very happy or satisfactory.  At a place like this the people who come are mostly fortunate people - with more wealth than the run of men; but there seem few happy parties or happy faces - much that is tired and cross and bored and disillusioned.  There is a cross man by the window with a waxed moustache, whose wife, a spectacled wretch, spends the end of every meal in shaking up for him a phial of purple medicine.  It’s no good saying people ought to be more cheerful; it requires a good deal of character to be cheerful if you don’t feel it.  The wonder to me is why more of them are not cheerful, why life should be disappointing, what it is in experience which drains people of joy and hope, and whether they could help it.”

My favourite phrases in this are:

• brows drawn up and corrugated with care
• feeds himself carefully and compassionately
• looks unutterably bored
• what it is in experience which drains people of joy and hope