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⇒ Cover ⇒ Preface ⇒ Introduction ⇒ The visit ⇒ Weymouth map c.1930 ⇒ Portland map c.1930 ⇒ Works quoted ⇒ Postface |
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A visit to the Weymouth Sands of John Cowper Powys [ ⇒ continue... ] |
"...Weymouth, always the centre of the circumference of my mortal life..." (Autobiography) |
CHESIL BEACH |
 The presence of the narrow strip of backwater, known as the Fleet, on the land side of Chesil, enabled Magnus, as he gazed at all this, and saw it as perhaps — for he was at one and the same time benumbed and sensitized — he would never see it again, to isolate this vast ramparted curve of pebbles till its stupendous entity seemed to detach itself from all contact with the normal phenomena of the world. This phantasmal detachment, endowing the colossal Beach with nothing less than an astronomical remoteness — as if it had been a parallel formation with the far-seen configurations on the surface of the Moon — seemed to mark it out, this bastion of the elements, this multiform Conglomerate, made up of individual pebbles surpassing the very stars of the Milky Way in multitude, as the actual rim of all the land and all the water on earth, as the true shore of that great Homeric Oceanus, from whose bank the slope descends that leads to the dwelling place of the unsubstantial dead. John Cowper Powys died on the seventeenth of June, 1963, and his ashes were taken to Chesil Beach and there they were scattered upon the waters of the deep. |
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