Laing so wanted to see the film, not least that it starred Dames Judie and Maggie as well as Penelope Wilton and Celia Imrie as well. Such a wealth of acting talent we have in the female of the species, and not in the first flush of youth either, but these ladies seem to get better all the time so effortlessly.
I passed the HMV in Westfield, Stratford and I though I would pop in and see what they had. Among all the big shot Hollywood blockbusting baloney (I was going to make reference to something else starting with B, but as I have a partly female audience with delicate sensibilities, I thought better of it) I found this and two other movies which I bought. I have just finished watching the film. It’s started me thinking.
Firstly, I don’t think it would have been the right film for him to see. For us, there are too many parts of the story that are painfully too close to home, such as the wasted” life of the devoted wife (Dench), the lost life of a spurned loyal servant (Smith), the paranoid suburban couple (Nighy & Wilton). All three of them would have resonated with us as though we were bells in a campanile.
Secondly, I never really wanted to go to India, but Laing did. Should I not go as a sign of respect to him? I don’t know. Maybe I need to find myself. I looked round at all the possessions we accumulated over the years. What are they? Dead mementoes sealed away into filling up cupboard and wall and floor space, never to be used or consulted. They are as dead as Laing. I need to dispose of many unread and unwanted books. I don’t believe in burning books, it has an unpleasant resonance for me.
Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen. (Where they burn books, they will also burn people)
Heinrich Heine 1797-1856
Books are a liberation, they contain thoughts. The better ones contain subversive thoughts. Laing and I both had our individual literary epiphanies with various books, I was the greater reader, but two books both made an impact on us, Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange, buying the same Penguin editions. Both are of dystopian futures, and I was more afraid of the existence of a Brave New World than I was of a Big Brother. I still believe I am more correct in that fear.
One sees a story of older people running away from something and into an unknown. Each of them has a personal journey. This is what life is all about, that “Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end.”
So let’s bundle the past into the past and let it be there (moving it from the present is another matter and highly complicated for me to achieve), let us allow the present to be the here and now, and the future, well, the future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera...
I wonder if I will ever find an Exotic Hotel, now with paying guests, that could turn my life topsy-turvy? I need my comfortable bourgeois existence to be troubled. Death of my partner is not that troubling an experience, rather it is more of a not unexpected event. It was 50-50 which of us it would have been until recently (see blog on Gallows humour). No, I need to find a new life, maybe a new way of looking at life. I can’t bear the thought of the existence of a reclusive monkish type (though saffron robes would look good once I get some sun on me), I need to be able to say “I feel air from another planet” (Stefan George, 1868-1933 "Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten"), and not only feel it, but inhale deeply.
