Quote of the week No. 26 : On vacations

Hot, cloudy and pretty close back at Lago Maggiore.

Holidays abroad over. Holidays at home continue...and I feel very much that "No man [read in this case, mother] needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one".

The quotation was from Elbert Hubbard.

Who he? as John Clarke, the man who taught me to edit non-fiction, would have scribbled in the margin next to a name left unexplained...

Well, it seems, quite an interesting person. Life dates 1856-1915. An American writer, philosopher, artist and publisher, and an influential name in the Arts and Crafts Movement. He set up a press inspired by William Morriss's Kelmscott Press, calling it the Roycroft Press, and founded a community in New York that produced Mission-style products. He also wrote lots of stuff I have just now added to my reading list.

For me, the most romantic thing about Hubbard was that he and his second wife died eight miles off the Old Head of Kinsale. Ring any bells? They were travelling on the Lusitania. When they understood that U-Boat 20 had done for the great ship, instead of slipping into a lifeboat or diving desperately into the unforgiving seas, they simply wandered into one of the ship's cabins arm in arm, determined not to be parted in death as they were not parted in life. They went down with the ship.

Through the flippant or the commonplace we sometimes come to espy something of the sublime.