Just Kristin

Vita Sackville-West is my newest role model. Her rela­tion­ship with her hus­band, Harold Nicol­son, stands as an exam­ple for me, a ray of hope.

I just rec’d, thanks to abebooks.com, a copy of Another World Than This, a col­lec­tion by the Sackville-West/Nicolson duo of favorite quotes from their respec­tive libraries. It is a com­mon­place book unlike any oth­ers I own, filled with snip­pets I have never encoun­tered, many in ancient Latin and Greek. I had to order this book, as well as another (a col­lec­tion of poetry assem­bled by Auden) from an Eng­lish book­seller.… Some­times I despair for this coun­try. Too long to go into here, really, but the phrase “dumb­ing down” has a lot to do with it.

I only hope that McCain doesn’t team up with Shrub this next elec­tion, or else I will once again take real action on my blus­ter to expat. *sigh* Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate my coun­try at all. I think I feel toward it the same way a par­ent feels toward a way­ward, abu­sive, near-hopeless (for can any par­ent com­pletely lose hope?) child…

Any­way, this book is almost enough to make me for­get my trou­bles. A trip to have my name embroi­dered on my new bowl­ing shirt, a la Lav­erne, may cover the rest of my woes, at least for this morning.

Any­way, a sam­ple from some of Vita’s writ­ings, this one from the first part of a con­fes­sion­ary, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal man­u­script pub­lished post mortem by her son, Nigel Nicol­son:

Of course I have no right what­so­ever to write the truth about my life, involv­ing as it nat­u­rally does the lives of so many other peo­ple, but I do so urged by a neces­sity of truth-telling, because there is no liv­ing soul who knows the com­plete truth; here, may be one who knows a sec­tion; and there, one who knows another sec­tion: but to the whole pic­ture no one is ini­ti­ated. Hav­ing writ­ten it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one per­son in whom I have such utter con­fi­dence that I would give every line of this con­fes­sion into his hands, know­ing that after wad­ing through this morass — for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceit­ful coun­try, with one bright patch in the mid­dle, the patch that is unal­ter­ably his — I know that after wad­ing throught it all he would emerge hold­ing his esti­mate of me stead­fast. This would be the test of my con­fi­dence, from which I would not shrink. I would not give it to her — per­ilous touch­stone!, who even in these first score of lines should teach me where truth lies. I do know where it lies, but have no strength to grasp it; here am I already in the mid­dle of my infirmities.