Vignettes: A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment

Chapter 31: IN THE BAY OF SALERNO

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A series of brief, impressionistic sketches that record travel and everyday moments across towns and countryside. The pieces combine vivid sensory description—light, colour, smells, and sounds—with small character studies and snapshots of local life, from markets and festivals to quiet hours in churches and fields. The writing alternates playful whim and reflective sentiment, moving between urban bustle and pastoral stillness while attending to seasonal change and transient moods. Together the vignettes form a mosaic of place and moment, valuing mood, detail, and human gesture over narrative development.

IN THE BAY OF SALERNO

Nov. 30

To gaze across the black sweep of sea, out into the mystery of the night; to hear the restless waves slowly sighing through the darkness, as they beat the rocks a thousand feet beneath; to love a little so, with quiet pressure of hands, and listlessly to ponder on strange meanings of life and love and death.

And so, amid a still serenity of dreamy sadness, to forget the mad turmoil of passion, to grow indifferent to all desire, and to wait, while the heart fills full of grave gratitude towards an unknown God.

And then, once more, to understand how life is but a little thing, and love but a passionate illusion, and to envy the sea her sighing in the days when the end shall have come.