Rainbow Child

We might have come back from Germany, but I’m still thinking a lot about it: the way I felt there, Martha and Vio, the beautiful buildings, the Entschuldingung-s I’ve heard everywhere… Man, I’d move there without ever looking back!

The book fair is just around the corner and there’s so much work to do! We’re all so tired and I’m daydreaming about Christmas and going home and, like always, doing nothing! My far-away friends will also come this Christmas back home and I can hardly wait to spend hours talking and drinking tea with them. And I’m already thinking about Christmas presents and I have some ideas but not enough and I don’t know if I have enough money for all I want to give. Well, I can be generous at least once a year!

Since I’ve been working with books I’ve started to lose respect for their physical appearance. Not that ugly cover designs don’t make me shudder, but I’m more negligent with their pages: I don’t mind treating books like objects and not like gods. And I read so much at work and then I read some more when I get back home but I don’t want to stop, I just want to go back to read for my own pleasure and venerating books. I used to think that the coolest job ever would be to read books and get paid for that, now I’m having second doubts…

I dont know how you can carry around as much love as I’ve given you – (March 1919)

And so you see, Scott, I’ll never be able to do anything because I’m much too lazy to care whether it’s done or not – and I don’t want to be famous and fêted – all I want is to very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own – to live and be happy and die in my own way – to please myself. (Fall 1919)

Was it fun in Paris? Who did you see there and was the Madeleine pink at five o’clock and did the fountains fall with hollow delicacy into the framing of space in the Palace de la Concorde and did the blue creep out from behind the colonades of the rue de Rivoli through the grill of the Tuileries and was the Louvre gray and metallic in the sun and did the trees hang brooding over the cafés and were there lights at night and the click of saucers and the auto horns that play Debussy. I love Paris. How was it? (Summer1930)

Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed? (Fall 1930)

It’s fun thinking of Christmas and the night you will get home and how you’ll look as you come out the gate. I will be surprised at your mondanity and very amazed that you are concice and powerful and I will be happy that you are so handsome and when I see how handsome you are my stomach will fall with many unpleasant emotions like a cake with too many raisins and I will want to shut you up in a closet like a dress too beautiful to wear. (November 26, 1931)

Dearest – I suppose I will spend the rest of my life torn between the desire to master life and the feeling that it is, au fond, a contemptuous enemy. (Februrary/March 1932)

Happily, happily foreverafterwards – the best we could. (August 1936)

Dearest: I am always grateful for all the royalties you gave me, and I am always loyal to the concepts that held us to-gether so long: the belief that life is tragic, that a mans spiritual reward is the keeping of his faith: that we shouldn’t hurt each other. And I love, always your fine writing, your tolerance and generosity; and all your happy endowments. Nothing could have survived our life. (March 1939)

Dear Scott, Dearest Zela, Bloomsbury, 2003

DEAN: So, how are you liking Moby Dick?
RORY: Oh, it’s really good.
DEAN: Yeah?
RORY: Yeah, it’s my first Melville.
DEAN: Cool.
RORY: I mean, I know it’s kind of cliché to pick Moby Dick as your first Melville but… hey, how did you know I was reading Moby Dick?
DEAN: Uh, well, I’ve been watching you.
RORY: Watching me?
DEAN: I mean, not in a creepy, like, “I’m watching you” sort of way. I just — I’ve noticed you.
RORY: Me?
DEAN: Yeah.
RORY: When?
DEAN: Every day. After school you come out and you sit under that tree there and you read. Last week it was Madame Bovary. This week it’s Moby Dick.
RORY: But why would you –
DEAN: Because you’re nice to look at, and because you’ve got unbelievable concentration.
RORY: What?
DEAN: Last Friday these two guys were tossing around a ball and one guy nailed the other right in the face. I mean, it was a mess, blood everywhere, the nurse came out, the place was in chaos, his girlfriend was all freaking out, and you just sat there and read. I mean, you never even looked up. I thought, “I have never seen anyone read so intensely before in my entire life. I have to meet that girl.”
RORY: Maybe I just didn’t look up because I’m unbelievably self-centred.
DEAN: Maybe, but I doubt it.

Gilmore Girls, season 1, episode 1 [transcript from here]

It is interesting to note that they are right who regard the dream as foretelling the future. Although the future which the dream shows us is not that which will occur, but that which we would like to occur. Folk psychology proceeds here according to its wont; it believes what it wishes to believe.

Sigmund Freud – Dream Psychology

Thank you, Mr. Freud, for telling me something I already know…

It’s funny, when you’re a child you think time will never go by, but when you hit about twenty, time passes like you’re on the fast train to Memphis. I guess life just slips up on everybody. It sure did on me. One day I was a little girl and the next I was a grown woman, with bosoms and hair on my private parts. I missed the whole thing.

Fannie Flagg – Green Fried Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

We were looking at high school pictures of us the other evening. My God, how time flies! The memory of those years is still so vivid, but it’s just a memory. I remember every trip I took with the guys, every party we went to, every day we hung out and it was great thinking about them. It wasn’t even bitter, it was just sweet. Like reading a great book, feeling sorry just after you’ve finished reading it and then when the thought of it pops into your mind again, it just puts a smile on your face and that’s all.

And in the pictures I looked so much like a child – always smiling and having a great time and wearing baggy pants and having millions of zits on my face. But now I’m so different from that kid. Not that I have a better grip on reality, no way, but I look different, I feel different, I think different. So where did that kid go? What happened to all my “I’m never going to do that”-s and “I will never change”-s? Life’s really fucked up.

Yes, it’s the season when I really feel like time’s flying away, but now I don’t have the impression I’m left behind. Nope, the bastard it’s taking me with it. Where to? I have no idea and I’m not planning on having another panic attack thinking about it. What would be the point in doing that? In five years time I’ll look back and I won’t recognize the person I am today, anyway. The changes are creeping up on me, whether I like it or not.