Presque fini de lire The Collection de Peter Ackroyd.

Admiration. Quel talent, quelle intelligence.

Je suis soufflé par l’élégance de la pensée de cet auteur — chaque petite chronique, chaque essai, tout brille d’une verve, d’une culture, d’une lucidité, d’un humour & d’un style… imparables. Quoique The Collection soit tout de même un bouquin assez volumineux (dans les 450 pages), il me paraît déjà trop court.

Une citation, pour le plaisir — mais je me suis retenu d’en faire quantité d’autres. Sur Lights Out for the Territory de Iain Sinclair, et donc sur Londres:

(it) is not a work of fiction, however, but an act of imagination. (…) It is a book about London; it is, in other words, a book about everything. (…) There are times when he resembles a revenant walking the streets of an ancient city, looking for runes or grimoires, but there are occasions when he alse seems to exist in some unimaginable future when strange territorial configurations or patterns of energy shape the character and destiny of the city dwellers.

Et sur la marche à pied en ville, à Londres, exactement mes sentiments:

These are all essays in praise of walking, and in praise of that mood of aimlessness and excitement which the streets of London seem to create — ‘drifting purposefully’ as Sinclair puts it, at those moments when the alignement of buildings or the pattern of courtyards and alleys leads the walker ineluctably forward. The pedestrian then mimic the movement of time in the city itself.

Lumineux!