It often happens, when I go to start a book, that I have trouble figuring out what it was that attracted me to it to begin with. With this book, I was under the impression that it was an old novel of manners, old enough to probably be unavailable new, I mean, although not as old as some things are, so at any rate I figured it was a decent enough buy for a used book sale, limited though the choices are in some ways, for despite the oceanic volume of materials, there is only so much actual variation in writing in this world of woe. 'And then after I got my leg blown off in the air-raid, my husband left me, and after that something even worse happened-- oh! let me tell you about that too!' [^In effect, they warn you off: the sign on the door says 'I am not one of those unfortunate people who wants to see other people happy, because there is always something a little more important to me than whatever it is that keeps other people from not deliberately provoking their fellows. I am also suspicious of the favors of others, because I am much too proud to permit myself to have what I want so easily.'.... That or the equivalent spoken in sullen silence or grotesque sketches, although I almost am grateful (for as long as escape is an option) to see how obvious they make their adherence to all the common vices. 'Mine will be a story of (amateurish) encyclopedic references whose obscurity I will resent the others for, and the principal character's confederates will all have been killed, leaving the poor soul to be alone and not know why, although certainly the cause is thankfully war and crime, and not because they are so uncommunicative and emotionally blind that their own isolation half-escapes them....' Like some stormy old crone who waves around disrespect the way that jingoists wave flags....] But this seemed sure to be gentler fare....

Not so. [^And this can be even worse: one doesn't mind ugly formless little sprouts so much out on the field or the moor, but when they get into the garden, they are weeds!] I mean, do you know what a novel of manners is supposed to be? A comedy of errors, about what silly fools people make themselves into being, with their grandiose ideas which are either somewhat disturbingly or quite hilariously out of step with the questions of everyday living-- but in the end it's alright, because at least a couple of them end up learning how to love each other. It's quite marital and feminine, although if anything I'm even more impressed when a man does it well and husbands his strength for this sort of thing, instead of piling scorn on what he is too proud to admit does not really deserve it....

But the contrast between that and what is actually in the book is almost as great as you can imagine; it is the social equivalent of target-practice, or bird-hunting. Have you ever met one of those terribly "clever" people who spend all their time talking about politics and the wars and the Middle East, and always want to be pitied, so that when they begin to talk about their own life, [^should they ever do so!], they do their best to make it sound like what they've got is *just as bad* as having their leg blown off in an air-raid, as they'll explain in their own affected way.... It's really meant to be a brief respite from politics, [^or "seriousness" or something], so that you can make fun of rich people, or hairy men, WASPs and "rich white kids" (a term one of my professors thought was an appropriate cultural description, as he used it several times) and the cave men who live in the deep caverns of the patriarchs, as a nice happy "social" thing, so that you have something to do when you're not listening to Wagner or saying that the Israelis are the *real* Nazis, or, duh, planning for the future when all the corporate kids are all thrown up against the wall and shot-- when you're not whining that other people think that communists are a threat. As much as I hate to take sides in the Belfastian scuffles of little hobgoblin minds, I have to say that little gets less sympathy from me than purposefully making your whole life a political war so that you can avoid looking at your own stunted emotional growth, and then be shocked when you find that your little hobgoblin hatreds have not gone unrequited.... {Unless it's the situation where one of the very Architects of political correctness, to which we must all *aspire* to conform, actually pretends that they have no influence upon the culture, really expecting to be believed, such is their low opinion of the peons they propose to "save".... But I suppose they deceive themselves, which is easy since they know so little of those whom they judge so harshly--popular culture! Please! I haven't the time!.... [^Excepting facile little remarks like, 'Katy Perry would probably let herself get raped, the little queen bee! She's not really one of us!'].... Although you'll *make* time for college culture, if you know what's good for you-- and once this has been established their grief is understandable: to think that you could say so many nasty things about so many people for so long, (and even to re-write every rule in the book, written or otherwise!) and that it wouldn't really *matter*, that it wouldn't really change how people *felt*-- why, they must be *stones*, then! [And they *have* said so much about so many for so long--I'll skip over mere demographic categories as it's too obvious, but even in terms of intimate relations: the women are always being made to say that a man isn't worth as much as sheer sullenness, and the slightest suggestion that he is, is insult--and this clearly is the author's own voice speaking, great objective man that he is, and haughtily above human needs. And in parallel the men are to be remembered--forever!-- as saying that any genuine sentiment beyond the most mechanistic sort of exchange made between strangers, and filling of the lady's desire for intimacy in a relationship, is soft foolishness which it would be improper to accommodate. How different, and yet how complementary, a couplet of complaints! How surely we must reject love; how constantly we must rail against it! And we must hope against hope, for the sake of human progress, that that the stubborn peasant's attachment to it can be broken!] (Although even if they *did* change, your snobbish estimation of the slobbish peasants wouldn't be high enough to permit anything like real appreciation, anyway. What does the common rabble know about Science and Literature, anyway? Stupid cheerleader ditz wouldn't go out with me, well I hope she goes to hell! Oh, she went to business school? Oh, I'm *sure*.... As though that meant anything to me, anyway!.... Try to be like me all you like, I'll always have been me first, you little queen bee!) Surely this is a people deserving of a good moral thrashing, the whole backwards lot of them!}

At any rate, that's what this book is, it's an aristocratic bird-hunt, albeit one with a cannibalistic edge to it: all those schmucks are hopelessly corrupt, beyond the reach of any religion's or secular society's salvation, by virtue of their birth and upbringing--except of course for *me*-- and I know because I play bridge with them every Saturday night. But in general, everyone is cursed: they're going to atheist hell. But I, on the other hand, have reserved for myself the paradise that awaits the true *hypocrite*, because nobody else is like me.... (Although, unfortunately, everybody is....) It's the *other* rich white kids that are the problem; I am the pure one, like Wagner told me in my dream.... Because God Am I Clever....

It really lacks individuality, and so it is not really anything like competent art at all. Once you figure out what all the working assumptions are-- and that's easy, because it's the same as you're always being presented with, by somebody or another: and it's really all the same, whether you're the brave Brit who hates all the people you've dissociated from, or the pure Gael who speaks for everyone who gets drunk on St. Patrick's Day, or wears a green shirt at least once a year-- it's interchangeable sectarian Belfast-style prejudice either way, [^artistically speaking, although there are important politico-military differences!], because you know that the atheist gods are whispering psychotic nothings in your ear....but yes, once you've identified the pride and worked out the prejudices, there are no surprises anymore: every character trait and every incidental snippet of conversation, every winding turn of plot and the hatreds it necessitates, has already been prophesied beforehand....

[~~In fact, if there's anything surprising at all, it's that the husband gets to read his own lines at all--it makes it seem old-fashioned!--although I suppose it's necessary to have more than one narrator just like it's necessary to span the decades, for the pseudo-sociological effect. But this other narrator, too, is still just the author's tool. It's like letting the cartoon villain have a monologue: Yes, I stole the jewels from the bank vault *laughter*. Of course it's boring and irritating, really. {"The Shadow of the Lynx" comes to mind as an example where a proud man is shown as what he is without making a stick-figure or a scare-crow out of him, and that book is much less obscure than this one is, and there are probably better examples too.} Clearly the author wants you to play mirror with the husband--you say right I say left, etc. but in terms of trying to extract facts or whatever from his pompous sayings, it's not so easy. It's like trying to take in what a fanatical Wagnerite says; it's the spirit that's perverted. The Wagnerite might say that some composers--like Liszt-- are middling sorts, overall, [^except they'll phrase this in a more insulting way, the charming little rascals that they are], but of course you can't trust his *motives* for saying this: it feeds his sense of great, bloated, pride, that's all. You can't argue about facts with him, because he might say things that are technically true--the best lies have plenty of this, but the spirit of the real meaning is always inverted and gutted and mauled, really. Of course it's true that not every composer who can re-arrange four notes that somebody else wrote, is a genius in his own right, but for a Wagnerite this factoid about Liszt--or whoever-- is just a pawn in their own malevolent plan. (Because who doesn't love to put down their "friend"!) But people with the attitudes of pompous schoolteachers could care less about these messy matters-- for them it's deadly simple: meanie says schools make fools, and meanie is wrong. Of course though you don't need to rely on what meanie said at all: just look at how the well-schooled old-fashioned radical himself, with his archaic words and his almost 19th-century-radical opinions about anything that smacks even vaguely of Victorianism--really anything that views the family home as being something other than an infirmary for those not fit for street agitation: those sappy Victorians, too lethargic for street demonstrations! (Not that there weren't any red flags back then, but, whatever).... I mean, look at how he actually *treats people*, this genteel champion of labor, or whatever. (Oppressed ever since the day they put that pink cap on her head! After all, pink is a terrible color-- only girls wear it!).... I mean, the story could easily have been re-worked in a rewarding way-- forks in the road, this-girl-or-that choices, and such are drawn out almost competently-- if not for the author's unwavering desire to implicate in evil even the most tertiary characters, like Mr. Keating, who within about three seconds of being properly introduced, is brusquely damned as being "florid"-- not a real man's man, not worthy of respect.... {And while he does stretch the story out over time and two generations, mostly so that he can squeeze in more historical current events to make himself look like a clever boy, his idea of varying character and manners is merely to have contrasting political obsessions, so that you can hardly have an opinion about one character that can't be generalized to at least half the cast, the way that people in poorly painted pictures can hardly be differentiated from one another!.... Although it's a lack of inclination as well as ability: as much as he sets up the contrast with the times of (insert literary reference here), what he *really* wants is to make a gremlin out of all men, as though he could feed on each and every character's diminuation....} Not to mention the fact that the whole "affair" if you will, is first mentioned and brusquely summarized in a lawyer's brief, as though to accentuate the contempt the author seems to feel for the story he tells. {The fact that he could half-heartedly curse a character or two for lack of genuine romantic feeling--a fault even to him-- and then, hypocritically!, boil the whole thing down to something that could be written by an exhausted technical writer, with the enthusiam of one cleaning up a works cited page in time for a deadline--what is that!} Because always simmering just below the surface is the desire to expound this atheist theology where all the little social butterflies are the children of Satan, and all the literary outcasts are the children of the Ch--ah, of goodness. (Just like in any PC story where the girls' club is the source of all heathen wickedness, and the math nerd chick is the sole source of salvation for an accursedly trite world....) Really, it is a story meant to alienate you from an entire class of people-- that is, an entire cast of characters, or as close to all as he can manage. This is what political stories, albeit subtly political stories, do (like that Franzen book "Freedom", which I had to throw away because it couldn't go two lines without delving into the politics of, say, drinking coffee, or scratching dandruff out of your scalp)--they give you enemies. They transition you from wanting to contemplate the many intricate small details of life, to wanting to have an overblown melodramatic throw-down with your cosmic rivals. Which is why I think that the only lines that he really enjoyed writing were the allusions to obscure Victorian cultural figures, and The Iliad, and such. {And it's even more annoying when he stumbles upon referencing something good--once in a blue moon-- and then pretends he understands it!} {And he does drop the most empty names as if they were bricks, and eyes one of the only truly worthy ones with a condescending eye, although this *does not* surprise me very much!} It's the sort of thing anybody could do, honestly. It's an almost bureaucratic form of art.}

Politics makes bad art. {I'm not actually sure what else *could* produce such a curiously distorted effect....} *affected sigh* Quel dommage.... [^=What a pity.] And that's one of the first things I noticed, this affected style of this recluse who spends all his time in the scholar cave, translating his essays in and out of Latin.... Unless he has "friends" who talk the same way he does; I'm not sure which would be more, frankly, scary. He writes things like, "He complained that I attributed his success to Uncle Linn Tremain who had given him his start, a debt which, in Derrick's version of my credo, has been passed down, unamortized, from Uncle Linn to Geraldine, so that the cluttered little parlor at the Algar was now the chapel in which the orisons of our joint gratitude should jointly be offered." I'm not sure which is more out of touch, his ideas about the way that the English language is spoken by lowly earthlings, or his pretension to speak in the first person as a female, merely so that all his own little rancors and rivalries may be shoved down her throat and subsequently regurgitated, thereby bestowing upon them a quasi-holy air. {Although technically he does alternate narrators and even flit from first to third person, all of his characters are nullities anyway.} He uses her in this way, but I'm not really convinced that he actually wants us to like her. (Perhaps by comparison, but never in sincerity, for herself and her own personal character.) He seems much more set in his antagonisms than anything else....

What he certainly does do is to start the whole thing off by putting it in what I suppose was the worst light that he could think of: in the shadow of a suicide. It is morbid and depressed from the first opening of the mouth to speak, and perhaps more than just depressed, but fascinated with the grotesque and the almost supernaturally evil, so that you have to keep reminding yourself that it's not a book written by one of those 19th-century Teutons with a flair for the elaborately grotty, but a book that at least purports to be about married life. And it's not because I'm in need of a history lesson, the way that old people always seem to assume, because I've read about what domestic civility in the age of the unnaturally upright consisted of, (even what Johnny Beatle did to some of his girlfriends is a decent example-- he discarded Cynthia with a wordless shrug, and that was when he was an enlightened artist, the way that he acted when he was a working-class lout was considerably worse, and of course your typical old-school money-mover with a heart of stone combined both aspects of barely veiled aggression on the one hand, with emotional woodenness on the other), but the best books about the tragically and deeply-screwed-up sort are the hardest to write, as any half-literate moron can make the sort of criticism that is akin to scraping their fingernails over the blackboard to make that hideous sound. It's easy to convert it into the story of the barely-human child-snatching goblin from the bottom of the Rhine and the innocent abducted youth, or the story where Red Russia fights with quasi-holy purity against White Russia, but a story intended to arouse the fighting blood [^the "nationalist" solution to social questions] is seldom the same as the truth. Slogans are fun--"Don't blame the victim!" when you know that some stories really *are* black-and-white (or Red and White?) but slogans miss the point [use a slogan, and all thinking stops]: as soon as you are slinging blame around for your ego's sake, you are not so different from the puritanical thug who "blames the victim", the better to have someone to.... hate, I suppose. So.... hate the enemies of the revolution!.... [i.e. the first complaint is always that people are too condemning, and the first and usually the only response is to exceed them in condemnation....] Only a real freak would write a story where ALL of the characters have virtues and vices and *choices*--nobody can choose your vices for you, a fact lost on the socio-economic analysts, although for an "*artist*" to make the same mistake is far more absurd and bizarre and absurd.... Although to be fair, the author doesn't so much paint a picture of God's little angels and Satan's mean devils, so much as he tries to demean and demonize everyone as much as he possibly can.... Although some people's demonization is *prioritized*: and that's why Jack was basically the devil, The End. {If it's about anything, it's about sullying people's reputations, and Getting Back at them. Wifey feels used, and so once hubby gets old (what a plot twist!) she 'gets even' like a good lefty. Although the characterization is weak--at first she's too put off or whatever for a grimy fight, but then after her cousin kills herself and I guess she Finds Herself and has her Great Trite Transformation into true liberation, [^not unlike Mike Nesmith's novel, where he's suddenly revealed to be an aircraft pilot and goes from being an awkward tag-along to a complete necessity in about five minutes or less], although however it works out *internally* is vague and unimportant-- the point is that somebody had to get told off, diminished or disproved like an equation: everything had to culminate in a certain somebody's lessening, or in the broadest sense an accentuated minus mark, a stamp of invalidation, not even so much in favor of anything else, but simply to leave you with the taste that All That Is, Is Wrong, and the whole human web of is corrupt in this most *bourgeois* of all possible worlds.... Office-dictator men and shallow-party girls: if anybody's to be less culpable it'll only be by hating everybody else; this world's too unworthy not to have its weddings mocked!} And that's why he had to start it the way he did-- think about it, a book and a life are different things, because the book can start at any point and go back and forth in whatever way is seen as appropriate-- with the nastiest thing he could think of: a suicide.... *cultural-fossil villain* The better to stigmatize you with, my dear-- and your whole family too!

{Although he can't keep the engine throttled to the max for the entire time, and so for much of it it's more of a slow burn.... Slowly but methodically bringing out each and every bad characteristic they possess, and carefully considering how even more pleasant characters can be moved about and put in a bad light, so as to be interpreted in as negative a fashion as possible.... At the distance of almost sixty years (from the publication to the beginning of the story) it's almost historical, which means you get to excoriate the failures of your benighted ancestors for living according to their own dimmer lights--because the author does I think know exactly what he's doing, when he holds up their national discrimination for you to Ooh at, and their social stiffness and repression for you to Aah at, as though you were inspecting monkeys at the zoo, that are too primitive to understand nascent political correctness.... And the poor behavior of the subjects does provide excuses enough for someone inclined to grab those excuses and run with them, but I think that it's telling that even when a person in the midst of the drama itself, who has taken her share of blows, decides to put her life experience in a positive light so far as she is able, (to say nothing of pleasant authors and happy stories), this is taken as merely another (beloved!) opportunity for *scorn*: Oh, you poor fool.... And so they look down their noses at the poor little thing, and, if it were possible, stiffen up even more than usual, to show their (unsurprising!) displeasure.... I'll admit it's a slow burn, and occasionally, as though through a lapse of some kind, it comes close to at least approaching what a novel of manners ought to be, before degenerating into another pedantic set of antiquarian observations or another rather mean insinuating remark about kith and kin....}

And that's the secret. That's how he's so "generous" as to calumniate against his own social class, etc. It's that special animosity that you feel towards your own family, and the people who are closest to you.... (Or perhaps all the *other* families which are like your own, except for yours, which is, more simply said, your friends.... But either way....) Which I suppose would lead me to my most difficult point, since I know people who have a right to be angry with their families, and as a matter of fact, I hang out with one of them *literally* all the time; I can never get away from him, wherever I go, there he is, a-hahaha.... But it is one thing to feel anger based on the maladaption around you, but.... But to turn that into an excuse to corrupt yourself-- I mean, to make it drive yourself on relentlessly, to find a higher and better moral standard than the ethical sloths around you, that's one thing, but to [^descend into nihlism, and/or] make it your holy authority to damn these bad guys, of these very particular types, and then to grant yourself immunity for free from all that that you wouldn't grant to your own bloody clone--or your twin--no matter what they did: that's hypocrisy, and that's not okay.

So at this point I'm going to skip over the routine where I go searching with the microscope for attentuating circumstances or whatever, and say simply and decisively that this slop has been forgotten because it deserves to be forgotten. It's been replaced by much along the same veins, but I'm sure much of that will be forgotten too, in its time, even though perhaps this too will be replaced by much along the same vein, if we're not lucky. Lots of people like to take the low road of scratching their fingernails against the blackboard and wailing at the top of their lungs, and maybe I did too when I was less wise and more foolish, but whoever does it it's not half as likely to stick around the way something does when it has real value-- so the bad stuff gets forgotten and then repeated. The things that draw the poison out of an injured world have a way of sticking around, like the Trepak in the Land of Sweets, since you know that "to be fond of dancing is a sure step towards falling in love". Although some people who try to draw the rancor out of poisoned times, like Gene Clark or the "L-Shaped Room" girl--I swear it's impossible to read that book and walk away with a sort of quasi-Wagnerian "nationalist" holy-tribe vs unholy tribe interpretation unless you're a half-literate political tool-- aren't permitted to help us the way that they could, and sometimes the loud rabble-rousing David Crosby schmucks (and their female counterparts, who try their best to be interchangeable with them) walk away with the crowd. Sometimes the people who get into the literary canon have all of the virtue of people who scalp tickets-- read "What Is Art?" and then try to tell me that Tolstoy wasn't a narrow-minded, puritanical, and essentially medieval, monkish opponent of art, because of Christ [^to boil an essay topic into an aside, pompous fools embrace small-town Christianity in an exotic guise]-- and that we put the author of "Judaism in Music" on the backs of every Wedding Music CD bothers me to no end.... But sometimes, things earn their artistic merit for holding for us moments of beauty and bliss, as well as lessons about our foibles, simply will not go away, albeit along with much spiritually dead work that embodies nothing but cynicism and vice of one flavor or another. But much of what is worthless and worthy of forgetting gets forgotten--you'll never know how many classical composers you've never heard of and don't need to forget about. Who knows, maybe a few more will slip into a well-deserved obscurity when better men take their place.... But at any rate, I certainly think there is a lot less holy wickedness and humanistic cynicism in the world than when Bazarov, the Czar of the Nihilists, still strode the earth, and even noticeably less in the younger generations, than when David Crosby was a young man. (Difficult to conceptualize, no, that he was young! What a history lesson.) {And you don't need to take my word for it--just listen to any academic radical whine that people aren't as bitter as and alienated as they used to be: like they honestly regret the thawing of the frost, which I guess is why they adore the literary fossils of ancient times, as their own sick form of worship....} So there's no need to mourn the fact that much worthless nonsense, like "Portrait in Brownstone" falls and will continue to fall out of print, and into a deeper and deeper obscurity, until eventually it will be nothing but a relic of a bygone time, the errors of which we will struggle to understand, if we should happen to encounter them at all. {Not least the pseudo-heroine, who even in her moments of pseudo-liberation, I mean, progressive liberation, or whatever, can be damnably, unnaturally upright and fake. At one point she even bluntly disapproves of *mirrors* (c.f. prudery).... Although not too much later she pretends to be the dispenser of amorous advice, with a hypocrisy that beggars belief! and which I can only explain through reference to an aristocratic sort of condescension. But, then, who can make *definitive* sense of such a messy tangle of contradictions--especially of such a cold and distant date!} Much of this will happen slowly, as errors fools made when they were young, once forgotten, get made again by the next young fools, and made new again. But still the slow almost continental drift away from old patterns of corruption continues, as they gradually become understood as being old and not new, and not old like the hot and the cold and the bright and the dark, and the primordial secrets which the birds tell to the trees and which the fairies hide behind the hidden door.... Not old like fertile fields and the sources of rivers, or the silver and gold which burns in the sky, like round open valleys and sharp constricted mountains passes, or the springtime and the harvest.... Like 'Yes' and 'No', 'Hello' and 'Goodbye'.... 'Hail' and 'Farewell'.... But old like the rickety old bridge over the wide river which falls away and is no more, so that you can never go back across it, anymore than you could go where the sun sent the winter when summer visits your land, or bring back the moon that saw you do foul or fair, or stop the speech from changing its sounds or the animals their shapes.... Certainly you cannot keep a mortal man from dying forever, or keep a little man's words remembered forever. To some he is a stranger who lives behind the gilded gate, who mingles with strange people they'll never meet.... To others he is the crabby old man who is always grumpy, who accosts them with complaints and ridicule for as long as they are within range of his voice.... For many struck by the same stamp (no longer being made in quite the same way anymore) he is the clever one who knows who the enemy is, and who are the straight-shooters.... And for a great many more, he is nobody in particular, simply a man whom they have not heard of, or perhaps one they have only caught the odd word of rumor about, and as the days that were vhis drift away across the sea over the horizon, and the fossils and relics he left behind dwindle and grow more and more difficult to decipher, they will care less and less.... The old that is worthy of being forgotten will plod, step by step, out into the mists, and once out of sight, will disappear, and nobody will be the worse of for it.

[N.B. Because if you grasp at the vanishing mists of time, they'll disappear anyway, and what you create--the combinations of today's realities with yesteryear's complaints, of 'Behold my power!' and 'Oh! How I am abused!'--will be entirely new.... And the price of this potion mixing claims of unusual harm received with the position of special consideration given, is the loss of sincerity, and vanishing credibility with those who do not like being lied to. The straining of the eyes to see the conspiracies against the rich married lady in the big house, (who could not be as content as the L-Shaped Room girl who had *real* trouble!), once inappropriate, will only grow more and more absurd, as nowadays she would be shoved and almost conscripted into business school--don't be a softie on me!--before being attacked as a capitalist: a trick! It was all a trick.... Although I suppose the consummate hypocrite learns to enjoy this dissonance.... {Another dictate passed down from the inherently oppressed and the ruthlessly stepped-upon: who doesn't love a little dissonance?} And indeed the old ones may go on telling these lies-- See what your culture has done! See what it's like.... And think what I'd do to *you* if you were to let it happen like that!.... (Don't you *dare* trust him and let yourself be a victim, or I WILL blame you!).... But that doesn't mean that the young ones will swallow the bait like gullible fish.... {Like when some celebrity says, 'My advice to my daughter Penny is, Model yourself after Sheldon. Study a little physics, watch the Star Trek--there's your femininity, right there.' (Although I suppose once it would have been a simple, brutish, 'Screw being a girl, girl!'.... But now things are *different*: heavy-handed guile is required!) I mean, do I look stupid? Why not just tell the truth and say, 'Look I don't care if I tell my kid that her instincts aren't as good as a boy's--really all I care about is.... Appearances? Conformity? Well, you can sell her that Kool-Aid, and she might even buy it, but don't bet the proceeds that it won't be gathering dust under her bed for a long, long time.... But how could I myself try to compel or embarrass her into that farce, without hating myself? [Or should I allow myself to be bullied into hating my own love?] And for what? So I can be a good little schoolboy who nods when he's bidden?} "The Wiccans don't have a historically-authentic, baroque-violin, approach, children: it's the *Marxists* who have the real truth about folklore!" Hmmm, you know what, that does sound true.... That's right, the dinosaur leftists have never lied to me; they must see the future.... Although I suppose if you really hated the people at the bridge club that much, you didn't have to go through with marrying for money-- I mean, you knew where that was going to get you, right.... You said you didn't like the silk life, and yet they would have alienated themselves from you over so little!.... 'Go live far from us!', 'Oh no, that's what I wanted!'.... How funny they almost are, who can't live their lives.....]

[~ Although really I suppose I also pity the author who writes to uphold the glory of his little political clan. For whatever the imagination of the sectarian may dream, their path only closes the gate to the garden, and sets them down a road which leads to pride and sorrow....]

(6/10) ( )

A woman's character emerges to meet challenges. Good. ( )