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Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009

Oct. 28 SCENES FROM THE BEACH

The poet, Hilda Doolittle, admired seashells, especially the craftsmanship of the occupants, (“master masons,” she called them) who created the “stone marvel.” Observing that “There is a spell … in every seashell, continuous the sea thrust is powerless,” she writes of the “flabby, amorphous” hermit crab that now occupies the carapace, its “temple, fane, shrine,” opening its portals at intervals “to the tide-flow.”*

— Diary, autumn 2009

“The Walls Do Not Fall” by “H.D.,” Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961); The Norton Anthology of American Literature, New York (1985).

From the diary of beach walker George Thatcher, a retired banker, of Gulfport. E-mail: fishcrow@aol.com. A fourth volume of Thatcher’s work, “A Decade of Beach Walks,” is available in bookstores and gift shops and at the South Mississippi Store link to sunherald.com.