Lady Marchmain

At Last

Fo the first time in many many many years I am savoring the joys of solitude. The getting acclimated to a new place is accomplished, one or two household crises have inured me to the shrieks of my landlady's brother (and proved easy enough to head off). I finally feel like this little brick house is mine, for the moment. It is a very quiet house and when it snows all night the effect is magical. Like I'm in a castle. The silence is, when you are ready for it, delectable. I never thought I could be alone for very long before--grew up  taking care of four siblings, a neurasthenic mother, and coping with an angry, bitter and absent dipsoholic father. Yes, I loved them all very much.  Which is why I drove myself a little crazy.  In those days being alone meant someone was in troubler and/or I had no one to help me.

All of it seems to have paid off.  While not liking it at first, looking out of the picture window at the snow on the third day of a heavy snowfall became a little less strange, a little more comforting.I can even cook for myself now, something I haven't allowed myself to do for 30 years. I am discovering, to my astonishment and great  joy, that one can delight in one's own and God's silent presence.

The below badly spelled post reminds me on second thought of some aspects of District 9, if you can imagine the movie turned upside down. 

Which do we prefer now?  Lust, just innocent garden variety lust, or Wagnerian transcendence  which abandones the human for the, er, transcendent.  When in college I always imagined the consummation of such an extra-orbital union as looking from the outside no longer like two individuals close to each other, but rather as some godawful pastiche of all the profound emotions the couple is able to muster in its desire to become the other.  Something, in the end, like this:

It mostly happened after the Sexual Revolution I suppose. Everyone wants  to be everyone.No wonder they are trying to reinvent the family.

No  one need be himself ever again.

As if we hadn't already exhausted the franchise....

I am strongly urging my children to take up their blog again. Adding many more younger people and much fewer me. I am planning it as a happy blog. Also, anyone who wants to become an author and put his two cents in on any subject at any time, feel free to ask.

After all everyone is scattered all over the country anyway, and texting just doesn't have much of a warm feelng to it. I will give its name etc  it at least looks like a very  small blog....

Lovers

I am getting kind of sik at the love scenes everywhere. For two years they were torture to watch--it wasw as if I had been exhiled from my owndamn life and all I had to look at were these people onscreen  jumpin all over each other in some rather unusual and limber maneuvers.  And  we are all used to impotent men openly discussing their shortcomings through the television day.

I don't think  it's envy--Imean it sure could be,I guess. But I never want to be doing what the models and actresses  are doing--it must ber grueling labor(as an actress).Yech.  There are thousands ways of expressing love and pleasing the beloved  Sometimes to  please the beloved you just have  to shut upand let her express her own opinion.  something even more intimate is just listening, patiently, without trying to provide any  easy answers.

 But there comes a time when the transformation of two, unnatractive, middleaged,self-obsessed people  took the courageous steps to leave their families and strike out on their own--preserving a tasncendetal love  mostof us can only (thank God) imagine!!!

I am so happy not to be in graduate school anymore. I think I have fully recovered. I was even afraid to read--I met a man who had a PhD and said that after he got it he could no longer read books. He hadn't read a book in 30 yeras.  It's like force-feeding--and force-listening.  No matter how much I agree with something a professor is saying, I have an extremely difficult time absorbing it the way I am supposed to. I am too busy thinking critically--adding things to what  he's saying, correcting it, etc etc.  St John's truly is the best damn college. Truly. I am unfit for any other.  I can't imagine the agony of going through more than one semester of that.

The other part is, liberal arts. Most people specialize  and don't know enough about any other subject to be truly well educated. If you are going to teach Aristotle and Plato,how can you do it without having read at least Euclid?  Not to mention the Iliad.

In fact I feel invigorated not to be in a classroom.  Shameless, I am.

I am now 56. In celebration I am watching season 7 of "24". I've seen all the rest. It's worth renting. i ate half a Cadbury Dairy Milk. All in all it has been a wild celebration.
My daughter Mo asked me what to get for my birthday and I told her to get Hungarian Feta from I Gourmet. I think shje did.

my kids