Just finished reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, taking time out yesterday to reread the BFG by Roald Dahl. Chloe had just finished it when the U.S. was losing their last World Cup game. The best part of the game was watching their sad faces at the end- not because I felt triumphant or any kind of schadenfreude, but because their close-up teary faces were easy to relate to.
The BFG is, as always, a pleasure, great medicine for the rolicking disasterous previous night's antics. I found myself empathizing more for the carnivorous giants, Bonecruncher, Fleshlumpeater, Manhugger, and the like, more so than in times past. At the end, when three drunken men wander over the fence and into their pit after imbibing their lunch of beer, I felt happy for the poor giants forced to eat snozzcumbers everyday. So the BFG has switched to bacon and they've become vegetarians? Hardly fair.
The Golden Notebook has left me feeling empty, hopeless. Maybe I'm too like the character of Tommy (not too too much though) self righteous and rebelling against the limitless boundaries of his parents, or perhaps their varying strict philosophies. He becomes happier as a blind person, having imposed his own very literal boundary on his life. His dissatisfaction as a young person who can do anything, have anything, any kind of job, form a future from his parents' capitalist or communist connections, leaves him immobile, indecisive. Now I feel similar, freefloating, without real aim or purpose or the vision of such thing, when I try to form it, remains blurry in my mind's eye- only snippets of what others do or have said rain down in detritus. Mexico, OK. Korea, whatever. Another place- fine. No food, weather, company, architecture entices. And the exhausting demolition of love offers no enticement either.
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