A Joyous and Paradoxical Thing

I learned about lovely shimmery bottles (demijohns) like this one in Mallorca, and have in fact written a couple into one of my Mallorcan mysteries.

This quote from Peter Carey's wonderful novel Oscar and Lucinda celebrates the properties of glass:

[She] knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.”
—Peter Carey

image:  Coeur de Lavande en Provence