I am in love with a new book. You may call me crazy but that's how enamored I am with the work of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz. He wrote only a few stories, but these narratives were miraculously and beautifully woven that they seem to haul me in to senseless enchantment. The first lines above my seascape were taken from his book Cinnamon Shops (retitled "The Street of Crocodiles" by Penguin Classics) I include in this entry a part of the story:

August 1

IN JULY, my father set off to take the waters, and he left me with Mother and my older brother, prey to the glowing white and stunning summer days. We browsed — stupefied by the light — through that great book of the holiday, in which every page was ablaze with splendour and had, deep down, a sweetly dripping pulp of golden pears. Adela returned on those luminous mornings, like Pomona out of the fire of the enkindled day, tipping the colourful beauty of the sun from her basket — glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skin; mysterious black cherries, whose aroma surpassed what would be realised in their taste; and apricots, in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons — and alongside that pure poetry of fruits, she unloaded slices of meat, and a keyboard of calf ribs, swollen with strength and goodness, algae of vegetables, calling to mind slaughtered octopus and jellyfish — the raw material of dinner, its flavour still unformed and sterile — dinner’s vegetative and telluric ingredients with their wild and field aroma. Through a dark apartment on the first floor of a tenement on the market square, every day throughout the whole vast summer, there passed the silence of shimmering veins of air; squares of radiance dreaming their fervid dream on the floor; a barrel organ melody struck from the deepest golden vein of the day; and two or three measures of a refrain, played over and over again on a grand piano somewhere, swooning in the sunshine on the white pavements and lost in the fire of the deep day. Her housework done, Adela spread a shadow over the rooms, drawing closed the linen blinds. Then the colours sank an octave deeper; the sitting room filled up with darkness as if plunged into the luminosity of the deep sea, although even now it was dimly reflected in mirrors of green, while all the torrid heat of the day breathed on the blinds, gently swaying to the reveries of the midday hour. I would go out on Saturday afternoons for a stroll with Mother. From the duskiness of the hallway we stepped straight out into the sunbath of the day. Passers-by, wading in gold, squinted in the glare as if their eyes were glued with honey, while their drawn back upper lips bared their teeth and gums. And everyone wading through that golden day had the same sweltered grimace, as if the sun had bestowed the same mask upon all of its disciples — the golden mask of a solar cult; and everyone walking along the streets that day, who met or passed each other by — young or old, every man, woman and child — hailed each other with that mask as they went, with gold paint daubed thickly on their faces; they grinned to one another that bacchanalian grimace — that barbarian mask of pagan worship. The market square was empty and yellowed by the heat, swept clean by hot winds, like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias, sprung up from the emptiness of the yellow square, frothed above it with their shining foliage, their bouquets of graciously gesturing green filigrees, like trees on old tapestries. Those trees seemed to be affecting a gale, theatrically twirling their crowns in order to demonstrate by their pompous gesticulations the courtliness of the leafy fans of their silvered abdomens, like noblemen’s fox-fur pelts. The old houses, burnished by the winds of many days, were tinged with reflections of the vast atmosphere, echoes and reminiscences of hues diffused deep within the coloured weather. It seemed that whole generations of summer days (like patient stucco workers scrubbing the mouldy plaster from old façades) had worn away a fallacious varnish, eliciting more distinctly from day to day the true aspects of the houses, a physiognomy of the fortunes and life which formed them from within. Blinded by the radiance of the empty square, the windows now fell asleep; the balconies confessed their emptiness to the sky; the open hallways exuded a scent of coolness and wine. A few ragamuffins, sheltering in a corner of the market square from the fiery broom of the heat, were beleaguering a stretch of wall, testing it over and over again with throws of buttons and coins, as if the true mystery of the wall, inscribed with hieroglyphs of scratches and cracks, might be divined in the horoscope of those metal discs. Otherwise, the market square was empty. At any moment, the good Samaritan’s donkey might arrive, led on by the bridle in the shade of the swaying acacias, at a vaulted entrance with wine barrels before it, and two attendants would carefully lift a stricken man down from its burning saddle, to carry him gently inside and up the cool stairway, to the storey that exuded the aromas of a Sabbath meal. Mother and I strolled on, along the two sunlit edges of the market square, casting our broken shadows over all the houses as if along a keyboard. The paving stones fell steadily past under our weightless, flat footsteps, some of them pale pink like human skin, others golden or greenish-blue — all of them level, warm and velvety in the sunshine, like various kinds of sundial trodden underfoot beyond all recognition, to blessed nothingness. And finally, at the corner of ulica Stryjska, we stepped into the shadow of the chemist’s shop. An enormous jar of raspberry juice in the chemist’s spacious window symbolised the coolness of the balsams there, by which any suffering might be assuaged. And after a few houses more, the street could no longer uphold municipal decorum, like a peasant returning to his native village who casts off his stylish town attire on the road, slowly turning into a country vagabond again the nearer he approaches home. The suburban cottages were sinking, windows and all, subsided within the lush and tangled efflorescence of their little gardens. Overlooked by the magnificent day, all kinds of herb, flower and weed proliferated luxuriantly and quietly, delighting in that pause in which they could dream beyond the margin of time, on the outskirts of the unending day. The suburban cottages were sinking, windows and all, subsided within the lush and tangled efflorescence of their little gardens. Overlooked by the magnificent day, every kind of herb, flower and weed luxuriantly and quietly proliferated, delighting in that pause in which they could dream beyond the margin of time, on the outskirts of the unending day. An enormous sunflower, hoisted aloft on its huge stem and stricken with elephantiasis, stooping under the hypertrophy of its monstrous corpulence, awaited in yellow mourning its sad, final days of life. But the naïve suburban campanulas and unfastidious calico-print flowerlets stood helplessly by in their starched little pink and white camisoles, without sympathy for the sunflower’s great tragedy.