This
is happening quite a lot with Margaret Atwood, because her stories
seem to prod and poke old thoughts, old memories, old times, or
impart, like a teacher, aspects of a question or text I hadn't
considered. Robert Browning's The
Last Duchess is
looked at with the eye of a student and an examiner; the whole plot
of Hardy's Tess
of the d'Ubervilles
is described in a single paragraph. 'Tess had serious problems.' My
mind sees Gemma Atherton as Tess and Eddie Redmayne as Angel Clare.
Were either, I now wonder, right for those parts? Was the version
they starred in like the book? Have
I read it?
I can't remember. Hardy was not a prescribed author. Seamus Heaney
was, as was the bloke who wrote Z
for Zachariah,
and, of course, Shakespeare. It's only in adulthood I wish Hardy had
been a set author, like I wish a different Shakespeare play – we
did A
Midsummer Night's Dream
– had been assigned. It's still today my least favourite. Okay, I
hate it. We pulled it apart and dissected it too much, and, in truth,
I thought it silly.
But
then I think myself silly too, in both senses. My over-active mind
runs away on its own, to lands unknown or to mapped territory, and
gets lost. Hesitates somewhere, departs from the way, and pours over,
some years later, the missed or not taken turnings. My musings the
same as Atwood's: Have I missed my own future, the life I was
supposed to have? Where was the point I missed it? Did a hammer-blow,
delivered by my three-old-cousin with a grown-up tool, to my
eight-year-old forehead dampen my spirit and cause a chemical
imbalance? Has owning a flat and furnishing it with my own
possessions slowed me down, shut me off from what should have have
been mine?
There
are too many whys, too many maybes. If that other place, that other
future ever existed, it's gone now.
Picture credit: Painting to Hammer a Nail, 1966, Yoko Ono (source: WikiArt).
See Moral
Disorder by Margaret Atwood.
From
journal, May 2023.
