When I find a book which is excites me I become a greedy, anxious reader, wanting it all at once, NOW, flicking through the pages hoovering up bits & pieces, looking in the index for anything of immediate interest, wanting to fill page after page of my common place book with quotes.
Then I calm down & read it properly
I am pretty sure that I did not read Mauriac’s Mémoires Intérieures when it first came out in 1960. I would not have appreciated it anyway.
“We live in a gloomy world, & I find little enough to console me in it” – but for me, then, the world was full of possibility. Now I am old enough both to appreciate his sentiment & take it as a salutary reminder to snap out of my own recent gloom
