I think that those few words were my greatest mistake.
You get a lot of borderline cases in libraries.
And I go to bed too early. I sometimes think I should never have married because I need too much sleep.
Boundaries keep people out; mine served only to keep me in.
We were both dutiful, of course, my mother because she was a dutiful woman: I myself felt less humble but knew that life was only simple when one concurred with the wishes of others. In itself this is a dangerous weakness, but it seemed obligatory at the time.
It is always later than you think.
They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.
Had she been more active, less reclusive, she would have gone out into the streets to lose herself in some sort of company, have made the pretext of buying an evening paper an opportunity to chat to the newsagent, but she rejected such stratagems, seeing them for what they were. It had been decreed that she was to be solitary, and somehow she had always known this. Once she had left her parents’ house all friendships had seemed provisional; even marriage had not changed that.
This was somehow a day on which concentration would not be possible, a day on which words must give way to images.
Secretly she envied those who went out and about, while she remained in the grip of her sentences.
I have been too harsh on women, she thought, because I understand them better than I understand men. I know their watchfulness, their patience, their need to advertise themselves as successful. Their need never to admit to a failure. I know all that because I am one of them.
People feel at home with low moral standards. It is scruples that put them off.
It is not true that Satan makes work for idle hands to do; that is just what he doesn’t. Satan should be at hand with all manner of glittering distractions, false but irresistible promises, inducements to reprehensible behaviour. Instead of which one is simply offered a choice between overwork and half-hearted idleness.
The distractions of the past few days had merged into one major distraction and into one unanswerable question: how to live now? I needed no friend to whisper insidiously that life would be simpler, for I already knew that. Life would be simpler, but it would not be better. The world would be a lonelier place, and no amount of rationalization could alter this.
The difficulty, as I saw it, was that she was trying to manage a public self whereas she was by nature a miniaturist who excelled at drawing into her field of activity nuances, intimations, unspoken thought, the most tenuous of personal statements. She was better at the glancing criticism than at spontaneous magnanimity.
Love imposes obligations and these are constant. An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage.
And my mother’s afternoon escapes from the house that she could not quite consider her own were an indication that loneliness can be felt even in the most ideal of circumstances.
She was not aware of loneliness so much as of endeavour: her future career as a writer, of which there was as yet no sign, would, she thought, in time validate her entire existence. Until then she would adopt – had already adopted – a regime which would steel her against rejection and disappointment.
Parents are only good as parents at a certain stage of their children’s lives, she reflected.
I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you.
Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically, hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation. Like the meek who are going to inherit the earth.