Has it really been eight years since I last wrote here? It was picking up Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood that reminded me. My reading diary said I read the novel in 2011, but I don’t believe it. I have no memory of it. (And you would.) I came back to this blog to cross-reference. Yes, I can see I bought it in December 2010 – for a steal – but wrote nothing on it.
An old blog, like an old diary, is a shed skin, preserved by sentimentality, laziness, and neglect. For a while I was appalled at how openly I exposed my ignorance! I thought it was charming. (An Americanism?) Also for trying to speak in a register I couldn’t consistently command. But now that blogging is a dead art, that the energy that once lived there has been translated into Tiktok, or Youtube, or Substack, the blog becomes practically private. I can come back and paw over this old, shed skin.
When you come across old writing, there’s an inevitable measuring up between the self you were then and the self you are now. How are we the same? How different? Time stretches us. I’m no longer a student; I teach. I still write reviews, but these are published. My first novel came out two years ago, and the next one is almost done. When time is short, that's where it goes.
Still, there’s a gap between the writing for myself and the writing for a particular audience. Maybe, just maybe, it’s this.
Private pleasures: third cups of coffee, the steady reclamation of a neglected garden, the sound of swifts at sunset, lists of things done and things to do, the turmeric loudness of courgette flowers, Iris Murdoch’s sprawling cast of characters, the thinking that her novels set in motion
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