Summer Postcards

“I didn’t sleep well, and as I lay on my truckle bed drifting in and out of dreams I thought I saw rivers I knew only from books turning like snakes through their shifting terrains. There was Eliot’s strong brown god; Joyce’s Liffey; the plum cake-smelling Thames of The Wind in the Willows; and the terrible river Alph of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

…Though they were nothing more than paper rivers, I felt almost drunk upon them, for they were the true sources of my own obsessive hydrophilia.”

—Olivia Laing, To the River