Just a quickie because I want to watch yet another episode of Numb3rs (sic)…
Been skyping my lovely Napolitan friend who’s moved to Colorado with her family maybe for a year, maybe for more – photos of frolicking in bikinis in the snow. She said she’s joined a Spanish Book Club, full of wonderful women from all over and from varied backgrounds and professions. This week, Adele got to recommend a book for the first time. She said she was so excited – a wonderful little book she had read many years ago, that she found funny and that talked of freedom and all things adolescents yearn for. Now, a couple of days before the meeting, she’s finished the book (again) and is horrified: the book is orrendo! At that age, at that time, it offered a specific reading. Just proves that authors are mere mediaries (is that a word?) to our reading contexts.
Films too (like Amadeus) can change drastically over time, watched under specific conditions and remembered with delight, then naively watched years later seem only macabre and pitiful.
And we’ve all probably experienced returning to a childhood space and finding it to be unexpectedly tiny, or setting off on a ‘hike’ we did routinely as kids, making the required serious preparations and taking along provisions, only to find that it’s a stroll up the hill and down again.
Distance, space, size – they can collapse and expand over time.
Almost makes you want to believe in string theory.
Letters from Trieste 