But of course Virginia is apt. And flawless. And I want to be reading this book, and reading it. And writing.

And of course I am not. Today I am teaching and tonight I am helping my darling girl (who has been so very sick for a week) to do a little of her make-up work, for tomorrow she’ll be back in school. And tonight I am making dinner and doing dishes and working hard on my drama class. Tonight I am postponing grading papers and feeling very tired and going to bed any minute. Honestly I am.

But I’ll have Virginia with me, and maybe I’ll open it again and hear those leaden circles and listen again as they dissolve. The chimes from Big Ben dissolve daily in those pages, whether or not I’m listening. And then there are passages like this one, passages I’ve read before and forgotten all about, so that I am rediscovering them at eleven p.m. on a school night. Listen:

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her. If he were with me now what would he say?– some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning– indeed they did.

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