The Children's Hour

On coming to after a Blitz explosion: "My mind for a few moments was clear of everything except a sense of tiredness as though I had been on a long journey.  I had no memory at all of Sarah and I was completely free from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, hate:  my mind was a blank sheet on which somebody had just been on the point of writing a message of happiness.  I felt sure that when my memory came back, the writing would continue and that I should be happy"--The End of the Affair

Saturday afternoon I saw two episodes of the '70s scifi series Space:  1999 with Dawna.  Or rather, I saw one and a half--I had to leave because I was getting sleepy. (Doctor Who it isn't.)

Yesterday afternoon was the Reading Out Loud Meetup. December is our month for children's writing, and I titled the event "The Children's Hour." I read a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek, a Hillaire Belloc poem about a kid whose balloon blew up his house, the poem "To a Monkey" written by a girl of seven, and Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince." In "The Happy Prince" you can see the influence of Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen!

Martha read a story she created with her Grade Two class, of trolls looking for a house to buy, with illustrations of troll dolls, Lego and stuff against green-screen backdrops.  Other reading was the part of A Little Princess where she found a coin in the gutter and bought buns but ended up giving most of them to a beggar girl; a Little Red Riding Hood spoof in Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes; and Wilde's "The Selfish Giant." (Wilde wrote those stories in his twenties, when he was flirting with Catholicism.)

I was just reading in The End of the Affair the part where Sarah tells Maurice, just before breaking up with him, "Everything must be all right. If we love enough." At first glance that seems sentimental, but there's something profound about it.  It reminded me of W.H. Auden's line in "September 1st, 1939": "We must love one another or die." (My interpretation is that if we don't love each other we'll die inside, like Mohammed Atta.) It's a very adult novel, not because of the sex, but because of the themes.