Status Updates From Changing My Mind: Occasiona...

You know you believe it when you start your own little family with some person you met four years ago in a bar, and then he tries to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that’s what he did in his family and you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building holding your banner about the end and how it is nigh.

Christmas, childhood, the past, families, fathers, regret of all kinds — no one wants to be the grinch who steals these things, but you leave the door open with the hope he might come in and relieve you of your heavy stuff. Christmas is heavy.

>i>Hollywood is vulgar. Every Englishman knows that. He knows it as he knows there is no comedy in Germany, as he knows that the Italians “get it right,” if “it” includes food, marriage, weather and landscape but excludes governance, work, driving and God.

This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with it’s rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place — this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port.

The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera. It’s a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime….When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there.

Forster’s novels are full of people who’d think twice before borrowing a Forster novel from the library.

About E.M. Forster: He didn’t lean rightward with the years or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; …he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, …harbored no special hatred for the generation below or above him, did not feel that England had gone to hell in a handbasket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were running the asylum or foreigners swamping the cities.

Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader- the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication… Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone…