TRAPS AND BRANCHES

Tut! Tut! It's the dangerous time of the day. The kitties are circling, singing their siren song of afternoon nap. The bed looks awfully comfortable over there, what with the grey weather and all. I thought I would see if I could power through for a while with some writing.

The stout-hearted and smart women's reading group is tackling Proust as I have mentioned before. My reading progress is fine, although it ought to be as I have read this part of Proust several times. Me being me, I can't just go straight-ahead and read, of course, so I pulled an ancillary Proust volume off my shelf, Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. I haven't gotten very far, but I did enjoy this observation:

"Cardinal Newman, in his earnest Victorian autobiography describes the awful moment of realizing, from a look at himself in a mirror, that he was a monophysite. Whatever a monophysite was, clearly it horrified Cardinal Newman to be one. It was something he ha never expected to turn into, any more than I had expected to become Cornelia Otis Skinner or Gregor Samsa had expected to become a bug. We work so hard to avoid moral pitfalls, professional debasements, intellectual fallacies, only to find ourselves metamorphosed, as we could have never predicted, into alien beings. We are caught at the foot by traps we overlook while keeping branches away from our eyes."


I find myself trying to see myself through others' eyes all the time. And I try to see myself through my eyes, too. Both are difficult. If I dearly had anything in mind as I sashayed forth in life, I am quite certain that this, the this I am currently living, was not it.

Ms. Rose is correct in her metaphor; I was far busier dodging the branches and howling at the moon and stars than I was paying attention to what road my feet were on. I sallied  on will and blind determination. And the curs-ed sense of Romance that plagues me to this minute.

I cannot fully articulate what I mean by Romanticism. And I'm trying. This wikipedia definition is certainly part of it:

"The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the mores of contemporary society."

Okay, back after finishing a book, drinking a cup of coffee, and researching Northrop Frye and Marcel Proust, again. This is getting long and have I come to the point yet?
No? The point is that my "rose-colored glasses," sense of adventure, and irrational belief that everything's gonna be all right have landed me at age 57 and, although things could be much much worse, everything is NOT all right. Not whining, not complaining, not helpless, not hopeless. Just telling you where I am. And asking myself why.