A Man in Love: My Struggle book 2 - day upon day

I've taken just to highlighting passages in  Karl Ove on my Kindle, often without any comment as they speak so clearly for themselves. It's easy then just to view my notes and marks from the menu and zip through looking for the passage I want.  That too is an eye opener because I realise how many passages I have marked that i have simply forgotten about.  That's not say that I wouldn't remember them if I had the right stimulus, but it emphasizes how much i forget, even from books that I have ready many times. War & Peace is probably a bad example, being a very long book (do I really need to say that - isn't War & Peace just synonymous with "very long book"), but when I ask myself - "What do you remember?" - and I have read it at least twice (is it three times?? why can't I remember that?), the first thing I think of is the Count having a dressing gown made of red squirrel fur.  I don't even know if that is from the book, or from a snippet about Tolstoy's life.  To be fair it is some time since I even reread it - and the first time was the Constance Garnett translation that I heaved all round France for three months and finally read in a little village in the Pyranees while working the vendange.  I have this melange of impressions - running away (or into?) battle, the socially awkward Pierre, a bet where someone drank a bottle of vodka standing on a window ledge, the Princess's stiff father, a Prince and an estate.  But here isn't much else there, it's like a forgotten faded BBC costume drama remembered for its period detail and production values.  I do better with Anna Karenina, which is not really about Anna Karenina, it's about Tolstoy, having a family and farming an estate - Vronsky and Karenina are just foils, although the image of Vronsky riding the mare to death in a race is indelible, as D.H. Lawrence said, but he is still peculiarly blank, a rather stiff and hopeless product of his times, as is Karenina. But then I reread that on holiday in Crete only ten months ago.

So today I meditate, run a little in the woods, walk down past the bakers, and think of an image, which fits with another previously written snippet, and realize I have a fully formed story to be written ( the first paras written just before this). I recall my wife's remark that I span the personal and the wider political stuff well in short pieces of writing ( although she thinks I lack the commitment and stamina for a novel), and know that the bombing of Yugoslavia will counterpoint this story of this young boy's 

...taking on seriously of Christmas as an emotionally significant commercial family event, where presents were to be bought and left underneath the Christmas tree ... 

The story begins to shape as I walk back, playing Graceland on my iPod, and the combination of the two starts, as it does now, the tears streaming from my eyes. Luckily I have sunglasses on as the tears run slowly down the outside of my cheeks, as I am not sobbing, just feeling, I don't know,  my soul's rain run across my face. Tears, anyway, that I cannot stop. Even now the keyboard is blurred, another reminder that I must learn to touch type.  People would worry if they saw me, but they wouldn't understand how this kind of feeling and weeping is essential to me - it brings me back to life.