Perfect Contentment

[mallorys_camera]

There was a moment yesterday when I felt perfectly happy.

I was sitting on the old swing in the unseasonably cool late summer afternoon, watching Rutger nervously explore the front porch and from time to time dipping into a book called All We Know, which is a really odd biographical triptych about three lesbians -- Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta and Madge Garland -- who were kind of famous in their day, but now are best summed up in a quote from Virginia Woolf's Lives of the Obscure that the author obligingly delivers to us on page 5: "One likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost... waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom."

I was sipping green tea and nibbling chocolate.

It had been so long since I hadn't worked for myself or had a high power job that demanded I be mentally on call every second of the day that I had completely forgotten what weekends were like when they were times you had utterly to yourself.

So this is what I like to do, I thought. I like to read. I like to eat chocolate. I like to hang out with my cats.

(I understand that last veers dangerously close to caricature there. But what can you do? You like what you like.)

Might seem bizarre that I didn't know these things about myself. But I didn't.

I have a couple of invitations this weekend, but I'm inclined to blow them off and do absolutely nothing but eat chocolate, watch the cats, soak up the tepid sunshine and read.

(I suspect this book is a PhD thesis that its author, a certain Lisa Cohen, somehow talked Farrar, Straus and Giroux into publishing. And they wonder why print publishing is dying! She somehow got it blurbed by Michael Holroyd -- I guess that's the Strachey connection since Esther Murphy was married to a Strachey. Holyroyd is the author of one of my favorite biographies of all times, a three volume exegesis on Lytton Strachey (talking about lives of the obscure!) Strachey was one of the pillars of the Bloomsbury literary circle of the 1920s. I'm not sure who their 21st century analogues would be since there are no literary circles anymore. Anyway and anyway...)

Comments

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Math works in the limited context that math works.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Yes. There is no square root of negative 1, no division by zero, and an asymptote approaches but never reaches zero. This means we're tangent to a reality we realize only in the marriage of contradictions, and we can't work with it. I hope that's where human beings are from. Life is short, people protect themselves, we forego a lot and I don't see why. I'm glad you enjoy the old cities, and green tea and chocolate and online dating, meeting new people. There's a lot on offer in life. I can't settle, I never will, don't think most people do, they are pleased and agree that way, live decided and satisfied. All I care about is true. She knows you or she doesn't. If you don't know each other, buy a stuffed animal it's about the same thing. I'm all for vibrators, but shared they are way more fun. I'm a Romantic. I meant that. I love fun, naughty is fun, the fun I know is with other people.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Yes. Because we see only the shadows on the wall of a cave, of a greater world outside we can see, know, only in part. So we are each known only in part and that is sad sometimes. It's a nice day here, hope the same where you've relocated. Outside, anything can happen.