a new book arrived from amazon, so curled up about 430pm thinking i will just pop into it. the attenbury emeralds, latest in a very long series i can probably recite all of by besotted heart. jill paton-walsh, wonderful, WONDERFUL, writer, carrying on from dorothy sayers, also magic writer.
and you know, i just finished the novel. too good to stop. so have lost nearly 3 hours. some deep thoughts about it, specific and general.
in general, one leaves beloved characters arrested in the moment of the last chapter. they do not age, or alter as we do, in our minds, they remain frozen, suspended, as insects in amber, in our mind’s eye. so when we resume our relationship with them, in further writings, it is a shock to discover that, just as in our own perceptions, our life, our world, friends, relatives, and other people have moved on – deaths and births, loss and healing, the gamut of human experience has occurred. we start on further journeys with them, and if the writing is good, very good, we immerse ourselves on those lives, separate but aware of the immersion, and are saddened again by the ending of the relationship. “the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all they piety and wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
forgive me if the quotation is wrong, i am dazed a bit still, and my appalling habit of quotations, learnt long before i loved peter and harriet so well, has not quite left me. anyway, i have partaken again of griefs and emotions not my own, but recognisable from my experience. their journey, not mine, but enough of human journeys, of aging loved ones, of growing selves, of mortality, and the reflected strength and joy of one’s children, hits me.
and i am scared now, that one day, i must potentially lose my friends of the page. i do not think i could bear it if the author decided to betray me that way, with the death of one of them – well both, for they could not surely outlive each other well. i have wept over the loss of many a beloved character, but these two have rescued me in darker times, and their loss would wound me oddly. oh hell, what of bunter, or even hope? i cannot even bear to lose my dear dowager. ahh, the risk one faces in investing in characters that one feels close to, even akin to. . and i am not ashamed to admit that, like many, i envy harriet – and peter – what they found. but i am glad i got to know it through them:) and perhaps it is because i can see so much akin, in mind and way, to who harriet is, how her trials formed her, and to thus feel sympathy, empathy, understanding on a deep level, of their journeys, and what it could mean to have that love, that life, that place. many women are in love with peter, but i feel such joy in both of them, as people, that i would feel frankly odd being so. i prefer to yearn for a like to him, in the same way i can feel like to her.
after all, in caring, what is real, and what is imaginary? one loves, one cares, one loses, and the grief can be tangible, as if i had known them deeply through only correspondence.
i have not even touched on the deep confusion when one reemerges form immersion back into one’s on world, from cold and fog to sudden remnder of australian summer…and the self.
