[b]Jeanette Winterson
I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don’t stand on the rim, don’t sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.[/b]
Tell that to some of the “serious philosophers” here. Like, for example, I’m doing now.
Women always bring it back to the personal, said Handsome. It’s why you can’t be world leaders.
And men never do, I said, which is why we end up with no world left to lead.
Let’s call it a tie.
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.
That’s sort of my own point, isn’t it?
I am civilised. My feelings are not.
Not many that isn’t applicable to. Eventually.
I say I appear naked before you, but so often I whistle for my invisible armed guard; the gap-toothed, jeering, club-headed mob, my feelings, that are used to having me to themselves.
In other words, I don’t have them so much as they have me.
I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about being happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is when I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.
Not unlike, “I was miserable but miserable is an adult word.”