Just finished reading Cassanda at the Wedding at lunch..
Really brilliant, lots of Plato in-jokes you’ll get even if you don’t read a lot of Plato (I don’t) and lots of prescriptive grammar musings. There’s this part at the end where the narrator says:
One thing about being alive is that you can swim. Other things too - you can look at the clouds in the daytime and the stars at night and think of space as something you can’t terribly care about conquering. Let it go on being spacious while it can. There’s lots of time if you think in terms of light-years.
I did a little rift on it. Apologies to Proust here.
One thing about being alive is waking up - the moment before you really awake, when your eyes are still sealed shut from dried up mascara. You strain your eyelids, rending them apart and wonder where you are. “Is this my childhood bedroom,” you wonder, “with the tiny painted vines winding around the walls?”
It’s not, of course. It never is. We can’t go backwards. There is not enough time. We get all the time we need.
In the morning, stuck between awake and asleep, time is still while we get our bearings. We think, today, I am waking up today. I will wash my hair and take a long tunnel to work, watch a clock and come home. This will go on for a very long time.
At the dawning, though, that moment, that one recurring moment, feels more like existence and less like automatism.
AB
