A life lived in reflection

Saturday 18th February

I seem to have lived my whole life in quiet reflection.  Not that that on its own makes it any the less valid, I have sat and thought about things while others ran headlong into situations they may have sooner or later regretted.  I have weighed up the options and more often than not rejected the rash and hasty course in favour of a more measured approach.  Only once did I let my senses betray me, and was ruled by my heart rather than my reasoning.  You can read about this in ‘Catherines Story‘, and as Grandma might say, ”Everyone should be allowed one mistake, I suppose.”  Although more and more I am realizing, it was no mistake at all.  Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and besides although my love with Edward was of a much more sober and ultimately rewarding nature than that headlong impulsive all-embracing love affair with Adrian, I am not sure which meant the most to me.  Besides I wouldn’t have had the raw material for the book without it, so on reflection it was good that it happened, the pain and the misery as much as the elation.

I have also read avidly over the years, and if I could but recall all the books and list them, and work out how many hours each took to read, I could work out just how many years I have spent reading the exploits of others from the continental capers of Miss Becky Sharpe through all those long Victorian novels, whisking through the Edwardians with their elegant prose, swept away through the twenties by all the newly liberated female writers like Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, the thirties of Mapp and Lucia and then those forties novels of Daphne Du Maurier and Somerset Maugham, the fifties of Eric Linklater and Nevil Shute, discovering the excitement of life as the sixties new writers came to life, and on and on through all the decades to the new writers like Zadie Smith, I have read so many books.  And all life is there in those pages of close typed text, and I have lived every moment of them just as if it had happened to me.  It has been just as real as my own memories, even if like looking at the surface of a pond I was living it all in reflection, it has been truly wonderful.