Tag Archives: Patricia Highsmith

STAYING WITH IT – DAY 78 in a year of..

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Day 78, October 8, 2016 @9:24 am

xgtj2464Staying with things is not my forte.  When things get tough/unpleasant, I like to jump ship and abandon.  I have a trail of unread books, unfinished projects and unresolved relationships.  Who doesn’t, though?  I’m proud to say that I have toughed it out and finished reading The Crime Writer – a novel about Patricia Highsmith.  She is described in the Guardian:

“She seduced a string of women, bred snails, suffered from severe depression, became an emotionally avoidant alcoholic and was variously viewed as kind, witty, and a nightmare.”

Nothing pleasant in the psychologic study of this woman or her life. It left me feeling as I had after watching the movie, The Talented Mr. Ripley.  But I stayed immersed in the unpleasant, dark and sinister possibilities of our humanness – what our thoughts can lead us to do. Not everything is life is pleasant. Everything is plausible.

I’m hoping this exercise of staying with the unpleasant/difficult can strengthen my fortitude and not run for the escape hatchet tout suite.  I wonder how many opportunities I have missed because I left/gave up too soon.

It’s tough showing up here every day even though I love the tap, tap of my keyboard.  But consistency makes it easier.  It’s becoming a habit.  Habits do make life easier but I still have to make a conscious effort.

What ship have you left lately?  I’m off to search for a pleasant read. It is Saturday, a day to sooth the self.

 

WHO I AM – Day 75 in a year of…

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Day 75, October 5, 2016 @1:14 pm

img_4891Lunch is over.  The dishes not quite put away.  I always feel overcome after lunch, unable to think or do anything.  So I come here to my space with my cup of tea to muse and tap on the keyboard.  I feel comforted and not so melancholy, surrounded by light from windows.

Please don’t get me wrong.  I am not unhappy or sad.  I am not in any dire straits. I am a muse.  I am by nature whimsical, sometimes melancholic.  I sigh, heave my chest, sip and tap.  That is how I am.  I poke along at a snail’s pace.  By chance I am reading a book about Patricia Highsmith who raises snails.  She takes them in her purse with some lettuce to events. The book, The Crime Writer, is a novel.  But Highsmith and snippets about her and her life are real.

Highsmith loved cats, and she bred about three hundred snails in her garden at home in Suffolk, England.[17] Highsmith once attended a London cocktail party with a “gigantic handbag” that “contained a head of lettuce and a hundred snails” which she said were her “companions for the evening”.[17]   – from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Highsmith

img_7928I hope I’m not like Highsmith, though I have been called eccentric.  But I am meandering, straying.  Blame it on the weather.  Blame it on the snow.  It is only October the 5th.  It is snowing and still snowing.  I am prepared if not quite ready for it.  I am not fighting it.  It is a good day to sip tea, have a cookie or two, muse, read about snails……

What are you doing today?  Is it snowing where you are?