On the train, after a stressful situation was competently handled, I relax reading Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries. It's lovely - irascible and unapologetic, Gray simply writes down whatever he needs to. He has turned 64 and seen his friend Ian Hamilton die. Within the first twenty pages, Gray has dinner with Harold Pinter and his wife Antonia (Fraser, the writer and biographer), and Pinter announces he has cancer.
I don't adore Gray's plays - I saw the critically trounced Cell Mates in London on its debut, Valentine's Day, 1995 (or 94?), and remember being seriously underwhelmed, even before the reviews did their dirty work. But this book, in which he putters along, speaking of his famous writer friends and looking kindly but honestly back at his youth and wishing he'd studied Anglo-Saxon more thoroughly so he'd know more about the origin of the word shiffen, this book soothes me. I think it eases some fret in me that he is an intellectual and feels no need to apologize for that. That he can argue about Auden not being a good poet without anyone taking him to task for his elitism. It is a world I miss, and yearn for, and, truth be told, am not really smart enough to belong in. I like Auden, and know barely any Latin, much less Anglo-Saxon.
The book eases my malaise so much that when a man sits next to me in the train, I have enough room in my brain to notice the wonderful smell of his coffee - clearly a flavoured roast, hazelnut, perhaps, or almond. He's studying a book about foundations, the page neatly blocked in diagrams.
The otherness of a life spent studying foundations further soothes me, like a french window into a new idea sliding open to allow a breeze.
I wish I could go to college again. Now I'm ravenous for knowledge, now I care less for the grades and more for the sheer knowing grace of grappling with the new idea. I'm still more at home arguing plays and poetry than philosophy, but I'm like to branch out into anthropology, biology again, maybe buckle down at a language. Who am I kidding? Languages are my stumbling block, and ever will be. C'est la vie. I'll bet - I'll hope I'm spelling that wrong and proving my point.
I love reading. I feel very sorry for people who don't or can't read, because I feel I have entry into whole worlds they deny themselves or are denied. I'm extroverted in company when the occasion allows, but some child in me longs always for a quiet space and a book to ride into the wind. When I read I become engrossed, so that conversation directed at me has to penetrate a thick haze ("I'm sorry, what?"), and any interruption aggravates, even sleep. Last night I made up my mind, after losing yet another whole night's sleep to a book, that if I ever have children, I will enforce lights out with an iron hand - all flashlights will be confiscated! As a child I found any loophole I could to keep reading whatever was at hand, thus beginning a habit that keeps me sleepy by day. Like all parents trying to root out the parts of themselves they dislike, my plan is doomed to failure, I should think.
In closing, I have the impulse to apologize for the last-post-but-one. I catalog the impulse, but I do not apologize. In the calm of another day, my rightness (or wrongness) is not as important as my shock that so few people even try to get things right - not intrinsically right, per se, but at least as right as they can. I deplore the thought that a person's objection to my personality could obscure the possibilities of my ideas (i.e., your smartness threatens me, therefore I will dismiss you as being too intellectual), but my own tantrum at not being respected reflects the same kind of thinking. I must decide I have something I want to say and say it, then whether or not people listen is external, and secondary.
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