mallorys_camera | Perfect Contentment

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...)