There's a kind of Brownian motion to life that randomly buffets you in myriad small and large ways, directing you down this path, down that. On my own for two weeks I get up between 6.45 and 7.15 am then walk into town for coffee, listening to New Yorker short stories or In Our Time podcasts, or just walking for the familiar sights and smells and for the sense of power that I get from my legs (really!), propelling me along. Today I listened to In Our Time on James Joyce's Ulysses and so I've picked up my re-reading of it again - there's something so luscious and so peaceful and so energetic all at the same time about Joyce's prose.
You can't say the same about Sylvia Plath's Journals, least not about any of the entries for 1950 that I have been reading - well there is lusciousness, there is energy, but there is no peace. It is the fiercely intelligent journal of an adolescent girl / woman who is aware of her powers, her desires, the social and cultural straps with which she is bound, and she is bursting to get out of them, but she knows she can't, she knows/thinks/ rationalizes that she must wait. Wait for what? Well that's the dilemma of adolescence and early adulthood but made so poignant in the light of her eventual suicide as an adult just thirteen years later.
The Tolstoy letters and the Woolf diaries I have just bought and I'm just reading odd snippets. I've bought the last volume of the collected Virginia Woolf diaries as well as the selected diaries which is a bit of overkill. But then buying Sylvia Plath's Journals and Tolstoy's collected letters ( 2 volumes) on consecutive days is a bit of overkill as well. There's a little bit of time left to read Hunts in Dreams, but only a little, so I have to keep backtracking to remember what happened and who is who - lucky it's a real book and not an ebook.
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