I visited an old friend whilst I was in Spain this week. She’s newly widowed after her husband’s very long illness. She has two small children. She writes TV scripts and novels for a living, successfully. Since his death, she's already completed a new novel and she's gleefully inventing a new soap opera.
She explained in so many words how witnessing death and coping with the subsequent legal and procedural and emotional complications had strengthened her and had given her a newly balanced set of principles and criteria for dealing with life’s common dilemmas and contingencies. To use two well-worn platitudes, she has emerged from the shadows greatly and impressively empowered. I mean it. Believe me !
She said, if I remember rightly, that she felt “ready to grasp the world”.
Next day, I sent a fatuous observation that I’m beginning to regret. I suggested that only megalomaniacs could “grasp the world”: and the rest of us might best hope to swim alongside, and to enjoy our short time with it.
Clearly, even as I wrote those words, there may have been some tiny splinter of uncertainty about this barely tenable point of view in the back of my mind. I say this with the benefit of hindsight.
I am a person who dreams vividly, and, amidst the lurid chaos, there are often memorably bright threads of narrative, and clear echoes of events and situations, both ancient and modern, which I feel compelled to reflect on.
During last night’s dream, I sat with a group of friends in the luxurious atrium of a vast hotel, gleefully rejoicing that because and although the world had just stopped spinning, we were lucky to find ourselves on its sunny side, if a little late in the afternoon.
Effing hubris is never far away from effing nemesis ! Even in my dreams.
In an instant, the grim thought occurred that although the world might stand still, the mighty oceans would maintain their angular momentum ... and then, all in the one brief moment, looking out of a picture window towards the blazing sunset, we saw a mountainous tsunami approaching.
“Uh oh !”, I said, “Here comes the Pacific Ocean !”
