I’ve just stolen a few moments to look at the blogs I look at. There are a handful that I peruse and enjoy, and they all belong to people I know, which is nice. And today those blogs made me feel better because, without exception, no one is posting much these days.
Why should that make me feel better, you ask? Don’t you visit blogs in the hope that there will be Something New to see?
Yes, that is generally true.
But lately, I find that I have nothing to post. And it’s not that nothing’s happening. In fact, there is a lot going on. And it’s not that I have nothing to say about what’s going on, because, well, that wouldn’t be very *Rebecca* of me, would it?
It’s just that I seem to be lacking the indefinable energy to write things. Writer’s block? Maybe. I just don’t have the whateveriusuallyhave to make Something Written about my everyday.
It worries me, just a little bit.
But then I look at the blogs of my friends, and I see that they appear to be in the same sort of place. So maybe it’s in the air.
And I mention this dearth of writing energy to my dear Rachel and she says, without missing a beat, “It will come back.”
And I feel Much Better.
So instead of some writing from me, I will give you a passage from di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which I have just finished reading and which, you may remember, has promised to boost my vocabulary. The book is not exactly what one would call exciting. It isn’t a feel-good kind of story. But the writing…. Ah, the writing. It’s all I need for exciting and feel-good. To have something to say is one thing, but to Say It Well…. That, for me, is The Thing.
A description of an engaged couple dancing at a ball in 1862. Read it, do.
They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenious ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.
(I know, I know. Not fodder for the feel-good-movie-of-the-year. But True. More true than *feel-good.* And So well-written.)
Ah. Thank goodness for Good Books.
