30.11.2025 (1): Stories Returning
Nov. 30th, 2025 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionI've been away on a work trip this past week, and have been writing some disjointed passages (I thought they were pretty at first, but on a second glance the have proven less so). But today I've spent recovering and thinking about the things I've read. Surprisingly, the things I've read have come back to me: I have been trying to remember my reads more deliberately by writing little notes, little observations in a little notebook, but I think entire books come back to me quite naturally as memories. I think this is because (unfortunately?) I haven't experienced that many things in my life, and so all the references I have are books.
I am being dragged into a marriage I am not sure I want. The other person is nice enough, but not someone I think I will be able to love - romantically, and all the other dimensions of love as well. If I marry them, I will have cheated them out of a more blissful union.
I am trying to resist in my own way, but it is admittedly feeble. In a few months I will have to break the chain, and I dread having to do that. I dread it very much.
And so, the books that have been coming back to me have been those about bad marriages - books which I subjectively read ages and ages ago. Such as this year's A Closed Eye featuring vampiric parents, echoes of A Start in Life with the absurd and tragic ending, and most of all A Game of Hide and Seek. I'm not sure why, but the squalid, desperate rendezvous of that one, and the scene where Vesey's attention to Harriet's wound 'enisles' her, stand out in my mind like red-hot coals. The nakedly flawed love of that book - flawed in a genteel, desperate way, as opposed to the raw thrashing of Acts of Desperation - speaks to me in my current condition. Also, in my mind I've been sunned by the borrowed light of The Golden Age, which was such a warm, loving book despite the subject matter, and also the hunting melancholy of Gilgamesh. I'm afraid that I'm a rather weak romantic.
I'm glad that I'm able to express myself is such terms, although they are all borrowed. I'm glad that I am not alone in my situation, even if my company consists of books (not that I'm lacking in friends). But I'm afraid that I see a future dimming. No doubt this is an exaggeration - maybe I'll have a Munrovian revival later - but I'm not sure. Maybe I only feel a little tired and dejected.
I am being dragged into a marriage I am not sure I want. The other person is nice enough, but not someone I think I will be able to love - romantically, and all the other dimensions of love as well. If I marry them, I will have cheated them out of a more blissful union.
I am trying to resist in my own way, but it is admittedly feeble. In a few months I will have to break the chain, and I dread having to do that. I dread it very much.
And so, the books that have been coming back to me have been those about bad marriages - books which I subjectively read ages and ages ago. Such as this year's A Closed Eye featuring vampiric parents, echoes of A Start in Life with the absurd and tragic ending, and most of all A Game of Hide and Seek. I'm not sure why, but the squalid, desperate rendezvous of that one, and the scene where Vesey's attention to Harriet's wound 'enisles' her, stand out in my mind like red-hot coals. The nakedly flawed love of that book - flawed in a genteel, desperate way, as opposed to the raw thrashing of Acts of Desperation - speaks to me in my current condition. Also, in my mind I've been sunned by the borrowed light of The Golden Age, which was such a warm, loving book despite the subject matter, and also the hunting melancholy of Gilgamesh. I'm afraid that I'm a rather weak romantic.
I'm glad that I'm able to express myself is such terms, although they are all borrowed. I'm glad that I am not alone in my situation, even if my company consists of books (not that I'm lacking in friends). But I'm afraid that I see a future dimming. No doubt this is an exaggeration - maybe I'll have a Munrovian revival later - but I'm not sure. Maybe I only feel a little tired and dejected.
