I did it.

I moved the blog to Wordpress. I just couldn't stand looking at this template anymore.

I'm afraid the contributors are all showing up as me, but hopefully I can fix that soon. Contributors! E-mail me with the e-mail address you use for Wordpress.

Now maybe even when I don't post I can at least change the look of the site. I look forward to doing that often.

Possession

A. S. Byatt’s Possession was a marvelous read. When I read it, at the age of 30, I was surprised that no one had told me about it before. And when I later recommended it to some people I have called friends for years now, I was distressed to find that they had already read it and loved it, but never told me. If I were a literature prof, I would make it required reading for my classes, just for fun. It somehow succeeds in being a satire of literary criticism as well as an unabashed epic romance.

I think I will prove my nerdiness once and for all by admitting that I was immediately won over by the following lines in the opening paragraph:

The librarian handed [the book] to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library... Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St James’s Square.

I knew at once that this was the book for me and that this character was someone I would happily follow. However, characters reading in libraries admittedly can’t sustain a plot forever, so all this romance and mystery soon develop. Mystery is great; romance annoys me a little bit.

Every winter, he tells the tale of Merlin and Vivien, always the same tale, never the same telling.

Sometimes the fairy and the magician are true lovers, whose reality is only this dreamed chamber, which she, with his complicity, makes eternal stone of air. Sometimes he is old and tired and ready to lay down his burden and she is a tormenting daemon. Sometimes it is a battle of wits, in which she is all passionate emulation, a daemonic will to overcome him, and he wise beyond belief, and impotent with it. Tonight he was not so decrepit, nor yet so clever―he was ruefully courteous, knowing that her time had come, and ready to take pleasure in his eternal swoon, or dream or contemplation.

We are always shaping our lives into stories. It is the same tale (as Sabine notices in this passage) and the end is always the same, but still we have a certain liberty in drawing the form of the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives. We can make a good life into a captivity or a demon into an idol. The romantic love story is one pattern that helps us perform these conjurings in our minds.