Nicole’s Reviews > Possession > Status Update

If the retention of these old letters in this country is truly in the national interest, this young man appeared to be saying, with his vulpine smile and slight snarl, then Market Forces will ensure that the papers are kept in this country without any artificial aid from the state. He added...that he had had to do Randolph Henry Ash for his A-Level, and hadn't been able to make head or tail of him.

I do not believe all these explanations. They diminish. The idea of Woman is less than the brilliant Vivien, and the idea of Merlin will not allegorise into male wisdom. He is Merlin.

He peeled off the little white glove, and pushed his ring over her fine one with its green stone, so that the two lay together. It fitted, though loosely. He would have liked to say something--with this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship--but these good and true words were doubly treacherous to two women. Their unspoken presence hung in the air.

Reading Leonora Stern's excerpt with Roland, I experienced a visceral flashback to one of my first ever graduate seminars--and the outrage I felt in reading about "female" things: who are you, Irigiray, Cixous, teacher of that seminar, fellow students, just who the hell do you think you are to tell me what I am like? Or, worse, to suggest that I am somehow not a real woman should these descriptions not apply to me?

I proposed a game of chess--because I thought it might distract him from a too vehement expression of his doubts and certainties, and because I enjoy these miniature campaigns. He was pleased to tell me that I played very well for a lady--I was content to accept this, since I won handsomely.

That glass of water you hold to my lips,
Had I my lenses, would reveal to us
Not limpid clarity as we suppose--
Pure water--but a seething, striving horde
Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails
Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds
Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe.

We must come to grief and regret anyway--and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities.

We two remake our world by naming it
Together, knowing what words mean for us
And for the others for whom current coin
Is cold speech--but we say, the tree, the pool,
And see the fire in air, the sun, our sun,
Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now
Particularly our sun....

They talked about horses and a little about the Norfolk Baileys, Roland watched Maud making noises that he sensed came naturally, and sensed too that she would never make in the Women's Studies building.

She made him up a bed on the high white divan in her living-room--not a heap of sleeping-bags and blankets but a real bed, with laundered sheets and pillows in emerald green cotton cases. And a white down quilt, tumbled out of a concealed drawer beneath. She found him a new toothbrush in an unbroken wrap...