Notes from the brighter side
Iwrite this while determinedly procrastinating from other tasks that require my attention. At least, I reason to myself, this column is on my to-do list too. This doesn’t detract from the fact that I have many other projects on the go, most of which have been desperately clamouring for some sustained attention for several days now. It’s a bit like having several springer spaniel puppies, all of whom want to play. You know it will be fun to play, but you also know it will take a great deal of effort and can’t you just go off and watch some telly?
Or in my case, read a book. Oh, reading! For a bookworm like me, the dream would be to stop time long enough to read every book in my local library/bookshop/ telephone-booth-appropriated-asa-public-bookshelf. Of course, lockdown has been similar to time stopping, and a number of books I’ve always wanted to read are now being read. I read Nora Ephron’s essay collection I Feel Bad About My Neck in three obsessive sittings. I read The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, An Optimist’s Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson, and This Must Be the Place by Maggie O’farrell. I got started on Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles in June and have been hooked ever since. Book 1, I kept thinking, “Where has this book been all my life?” Book 2, I realised I wished I had read them three years ago, for the wisdom they would have provided, which I otherwise had to learn myself.
Hopefully this illustrates how hard it is to work when distracted by literature. As much as I love my work, whatever is going to happen to Louise Cazalet next?! Will Rachel’s secret be discovered, and will Tonbridge get divorced? This is why books are so wonderful: they are the art form that most recognisably immerses you in another person’s psyche, another person’s world, by the use of language. We are a linguistic species, so it makes sense that words are the most powerful instruments for telling stories. The reader can feel so viscerally attached that the story takes on a personal significance. When I finished The Pursuit of Love – and stop reading if you hate spoilers – I was so fraught that I burst in on my family preparing lunch and cried, “Linda Radlett has died! ”, forgetting that: a) no one in my family knows who Linda Radlett is, because b) she is fictional.
Perhaps this is why during lockdown, (online) purchases of books have doubled, tripled, quadrupled, in ways that no other commodity (other than food) has. Because people need a reality holiday. And the best way to step into someone else’s life is through their words.