Eier im Glas

I am trying to read Paddy Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts as slowly as possible. It is the first stage of his 18 and 19-year old walk from Holland to Constantinople in 1934. I started with the second stage, and he died before writing the last. He wrote these memoirs after the age of sixty.

I am comforted by the thought that when I have finished it there will be more Fermor books to read. Once I start to read someone new, and this good, I hate to leave. So I tend to read everything they have written. And then sulk around afterwards, terrified to start something new and foreign. I find his writing wonderful, and am humbled and rivetted by his far-penetrating perception and analysis of landscape, through layers of history, art, architecture, lore, literature and language. Neither forgetting the physical beauty of, nor neglecting to describe - often with unaffected wonder - what he sees.

Which includes eggs. He desribes his arrival in Linz:

"When I got to the the fine sweeping piazza in the middle of the city I chose a promising-looking coffee house, kicked off the snow, went in and ordered two boiled eggs. Eier im Glas! It was my latest passion. The delight of tapping the eggs all over with a bone spoon before removing the fragmented shell and sliding the fragile contents into a tumbler intact , then a slice of butter...travellers' joys."


It makes me think of Hemingway's eggs in The Garden of Eden, a book not opened in perhaps a decade. Time.

To my Eier im Glas I added snipped chives.